Now Playing: Kingdom Come

Kingdom Come: Deliverance has a strong opening from both a narrative and gameplay perspective. I thoroughly enjoyed my initial 20 hours with KC, as I described in my First Impressions post. I was hooked by the story, I liked Henry as a protagonist, I liked the supporting cast of friends and foes, and I liked that Henry really did suck at everything.

Having to learn how to fight, sneak, steal and even read, gave those initial hours a great sense of satisfaction at seeing Henry becoming strong and smarter with every step you took. You actually had to be clever when approaching dangerous situations – such as a camp of hostile bandits. The game felt challenging in the best possible way.

The problem Kingdom Come has, is that the challenge soon dissipates. Once you acquire better gear, level up some of your stats, and gain a good grasp of the combat system, it all becomes incredibly easy. It does make sense within the context of the world – the quality of your equipment and your experience in combat will naturally give you an advantage over others – but it also results in a game where combat and stealth become increasingly trivial, even during the story based missions.

There doesn’t appear to be any level scaling in Kingdom Come so if, like me, you prefer to break up the main quest by completing side missions on the way, you’ll suddenly find some of the main quests become a bit of a joke. To give you an example, one of the earlier main quests sees you face off against a ‘boss’ type character who I was particularly excited to fight, as the confrontation was nicely set up by the narrative.

 

However, the actual fight was incredibly anticlimactic. Because I’d spent some time doing side missions and increasing my stats prior to this fight, I only struck this ‘boss’ character once and the fight was over. It was a disappointing end to what should have been the most challenging and engaging fight in the game so far.

Fighting multiple opponents can still prove tricky as you progress, but that’s primarily due to how clumsy the combat system becomes when attempting to fight more than one person – and this is an issue which becomes even more prevalent during the later stages of the main story. As I said in my FI post, the combat works best in 1v1 situations. As soon as 3 or more people are involved, it becomes a bit of a mess.

This is very noticeable in the story missions that involve large scale battles. Trying to pick out an opponent and fight 1v1 is nearly impossible as ally and enemy soldiers surround you and everyone clips through one another in a big, clumsy mess. It’s far easier to just run behind enemies and strike at their exposed backs. And they’ll let you do it too, because enemy AI, when it comes to these big scale fights, is pretty terrible and easy to abuse.

 

Kingdom Come has this strange separation between narrative and gameplay. I really enjoyed the core story and the majority of the story based side missions, but I enjoyed them more for the narrative rather than the gameplay. And that’s because Kingdom Come doesn’t always value your time.

What do I mean by that? I mean that the game likes to pad its content with unnecessary travel. Far too many quests have you bouncing back and forth between the same locations to the point of tedium. To give you an example – one side quest has you stealing various items from various locations. Towards the end of this quest chain you’re tasked with stealing an item from a farm. You travel to the farm, steal the item and return . . . only to be tasked with stealing another item from the same farm.

As part of another quest you have to convince a guy to go to the blacksmith to pull out his sore tooth (don’t ask) and once you do, escort him so he doesn’t chicken out. There’s a blacksmith within a short walk of the guy but instead, he decides to slowly walk to the other blacksmith on the far side of town across the river.

It’s little stuff like this that really irritated me throughout the entire game. I didn’t hate it. It was just mildly annoying and totally unnecessary. It probably didn’t help that the majority of the quests and action takes place within one half of the world map – the other half is barely utilised – so you’re always going to be travelling through the same areas and roads fairly often.

 

Some skills also feel like a ridiculous grind to improve. Despite playing Kingdom Come for 65 hours, completing the core story and over 80 quests, I still fell short of hitting max level – although I do wonder if this was bugged. I also barely improved some skills – such as lock picking – despite using them frequently.

Although I found the travelling aspects of the missions somewhat tedious, I can say that I enjoyed them all for the stories they told. There’s some really enjoyable stuff in here and I don’t want to be too harsh or make it sound too bad – because it’s not. As I said, it’s more mildly irritating than anything.

Which kind of sums up how I feel about Kingdom Come: Deliverance as an overall experience. It’s really very good – the story, the characters and the world in particular. It looks great and my performance was consistently solid. I didn’t experience any major bugs or issues, aside from a single quest which I wasn’t able to complete properly.

I liked the combat. I liked learning and training new skills. In fact, I liked pretty much everything about it – but it’s a game hampered by so many minor irritations that they drag the overall experience down.

7/10