Kingdom Come: Deliverance II takes place after the events of the original, but whilst it builds on that story with the same characters, it’s a much better-told tale. The stakes feel higher, the emotional element feels much more earned than the previous games, and the political intrigue is fascinating. While I didn’t think much of Henry specifically in the original game, he comes into his own as a character in Deliverance II, and the team at Warhorse have put great effort into making him and his interactions with those (especially some you’d never expect) more endearing.
Like the original game, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II aims to be a historically accurate representation of 15th-century Bohemia. You play (mostly) as Henry, and, similar to games like Skyrim, it’s all done from the first person. However, where Skyrim employs fantasy, magic, and other elements to tell its story, Deliverance II is grounded firmly in realism and historical accuracy. That accuracy permeates every aspect of the game’s design. Not only will NPCs remember everything you do, but Henry has basic biological needs that must be met to keep him fit for his travels. He needs to eat and sleep like we do, though Deliverance II uses this system better than its predecessor.
Everything you do in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II has a cost – whether tangible or not. Choosing to do a certain quest may make another quest more difficult. But choosing to do that might also lead to time spent, which means Henry might grow tired or become hungry. Having less energy from being tired for too long affects your charisma and speech, which might mean you have a harder time negotiating with people during a quest. Of course, it also means you might stumble in combat too. While this sounds annoying and usually puts me off games like these, Deliverance II feels adequately balanced. In my review of the original game, I lamented that this dedication to realism got in the way of the game’s playability. That doesn’t feel like an issue in Deliverance II.
I’ve talked at length in my preview of how much your choices matter in Deliverance II, and spending more time with the game, that only became more apparent. That said, while you have a lot of choice in how you approach quests, the game sometimes feels a little bit too free. What I mean by this is that often, even if you have negative consequences to a choice, there is almost always a way to talk your way out of something or even steal your way out of something. Perhaps my Henry was just built in all the right ways to get out of anything, but it is a bit of a double-edged sword where the freedom of choice means you can do almost anything.
But it does result in a game where its world feels open in two ways: you can physically explore it of your own free will, but you can also explore all of your options based on how you choose to play your Henry. I adore this type of design, though I sometimes wish it were more transparent with why certain things are happening. Sometimes, I’d rock up to an inn and ask for a room, and the keeper would just not let me stay there, hostile from the beginning. That’s like real life, where people might not like you, but a simple explanation would’ve been nice so I knew what I did wrong.
This lack of handholding is bound to be divisive with most players and carries over into the other aspects of the game. Whether brewing potions or even smithing your weapons, the game will give you a short tutorial before letting you loose on each to create whatever you want. From that point, if you’re crafty enough, the system is flexible enough to allow you to start creating things much quicker than when you begin.
I geared more towards the alchemy system for my crafting, being able to create whatever potions I wanted with the recipes I’d gathered. Both alchemy and smithing reward you for better performance of the craft and it can be gratifying to get so good at crafting that you skip steps and come up with better goods without doing the steps the game tells you. Knowing that a turn of your hourglass in alchemy is eight seconds and being able to skip that step entirely to make things easier feels like a natural way to get better at crafting.
The same can be said for the combat, which feels realistic but fair. While I enjoyed the approach of the previous game, allowing you to attack from six different points with your sword, Deliverance II simplifies things down to four different points of attack. In place of this simplification is a combo system, where a certain pattern of directions will essentially let Henry perform moves he previously couldn’t. It can be a tough system to grasp, especially in the early days, but to see yourself (and Henry) get better as you spend more time engaging in combat is incredibly fulfilling. You’ll still struggle to compete against, say, a group of more than four, but with enough skill, it’s certainly possible.
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The progression system is thusly similar to Skyrim. Henry earns perk points whenever he improves one of his skills, with each skill being levelled up by carrying out that action. For example, stealth points are granted for sneaking around, while heavy weapon points are earned by fighting with heavy weapons. It’s a clever system that encourages experimentation. If you want to become a hefty knight, you simply start acting like one. It is a skill system that naturally flows and meshes with your specific style of play. You can respec, too, though not straight away.
To top this off, Henry also has access to a mount and a trusty canine companion named Mutt. Both have great applications in combat, though Mutt is the standout here. He reappears from the DLC of the first game and can be used to track the scent of items during certain quests, bark to distract enemies or even attack enemies at your command. Like everything else in Deliverance II, bringing him along can be risky, as he can sometimes bark at guards if you’re trying to sneak around or even get into battles with other dogs that aren’t your own. He’s a cool little companion, though, and keeping him obedient is well worth your time.
But regardless of how you choose to play Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, there’s no denying it’s not looking to short-change players. While I’d estimate the main path to take between forty to sixty hours, you can easily stretch that if you carry out some of the game’s many side quests. There’s a heap to look at in both of the game’s extensive areas and while some side content is pretty typical, most of it feels worth it. Deliverance II is easily a game, nay, a world that you can lose yourself in for hours.
Often I’d get lost in many of the stories, thinking they were part of the main quest, only to discover they weren’t. My favourites were the ones that concerned characters and the superstitions they hold, including one where you have to treat a soldier with anxiety. Just seeing my very well-read Henry diagnose a soldier with anxiety when he hasn’t seen much of that kind of mental health issue in his world is the angle that Kingdom Come: Deliverance II takes with its writing that I’d have never expected. Others, where people claim to see dragons or be possessed by demons, are similarly well put together and have just the right amount of intrigue to plant that doubt in your mind about whether they exist in this world.
While there’s a lot to love about Deliverance II, it’s by no means perfect, however. While the game has been incredibly polished, launching in a much better state than the original Deliverance, a few bugs still persisted throughout my playtime. Autosaving has become more lenient, especially during combat, so not much time was lost in the face of a bug. But other little things that will hopefully be fixed did bring down the experience. For one, it would take three to four seconds to load the map in the second area, which got grating if I was travelling to a new location. Still, a lot of the bugs I ran into were purely cosmetic, so no progress was lost, which meant no frustration that I felt with the original game.
Despite some visual hiccups here and there, the world of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is very picturesque. As usual, the game offers a performance and fidelity mode, and even when playing in performance, the game still looked and performed great. Sometimes, if heaps of people were on-screen, especially in combat, things would slow down on console. But otherwise, the performance is fairly consistent. From an art perspective, the game is beautiful. While none of the locations have a particular flair, they capture a certain sense of time and place that I don’t see in many games. Such an atmosphere is complemented beautifully by the original soundtrack, which uses a lot of harps, strings, and flutes to help paint the world as a whimsical era of fantasy and adventure.
So while there are some minor visual nitpicks that could be easily fixed with future updates, Kingdom Come: Deliverance Il feels like an improvement on the original in practically every way. It’s a great medieval playground that stays true to its roots without betraying the spirit of its predecessor. It’s a world where your choices, both big and small, absolutely matter. And, more importantly, it feels like a better-honed version of the original game with a remarkably better story. And that’s all you can ask for in a sequel, and Warhorse has delivered that in numbers.