KINGDOM COME: DELIVERANCE
Unstable, unforgiving, yet still manages to be majestic
Life was a slog in medieval times. You had to wash your jerkins in great buckets of filthy water, navigate treacherous muddy roads in the thick of night, and generally invest a tiring amount of time into just staying alive. RPG/medieval survival sim Kingdom Come: Deliverance unwaveringly captures much of that experience, for better and for worse. 15th-century Bohemia may be a harsh place, but at least it’s a pretty one, which may provide some solace when you’re bleeding out from an arrow, or keeling over from food poisoning after eating a rotten parsnip. The rolling countryside feels like a place in history rather than fantasy; rocky monasteries cast God’s shadow over riverside villages, serfs till the hillside fields before heading to the tavern for a beer, and the hand-crafted forests bristle with unparalleled realism.
A fine setting for a tale of feudal conflict then. Kingdom Come tells the story of Henry, a blacksmith’s son from a small village in Bohemia. The land is in turmoil, and Henry gets caught in the middle as his village is razed and parents killed by a mercenary army. After fleeing to a nearby holding, Henry becomes Squire-boy Number One for a group of local Lords, helping them take on the threat by running errands, fighting battles, and, should you make the same mistakes I did, shagging an ageing lord’s wife.
HUMBLE HENRY
Despite his potential transgressions, Henry is a likeable sort. His unglamorous appearance and laddish lexicon are a far cry from the more distinguished heroes we’re used to playing as, but that’s what makes him relatable, and it’s easy to engage in his journey from cheeky village chappie to vengeful soldier.
You improve Henry’s skills through using them. Every few levels, you pick perks – from new sword combos to a ‘Manly Odor’ that makes you more attractive to ladies but less stealthy; certain perks lock others off, so you shouldn’t take these decisions lightly. It’s a game that rewards commitment to a build: with enough speechcraft and some fancy togs, you can sweettalk your way through many situations. Conversely, showing someone your bloodied sword or swinging it at them also does the job.
The quests are varied and well structured, ranging from grave-digging to a brilliant sequence where you enrol in a monastery to become a Benedictine monk. Each quest demands more legwork than your typical RPG. If you’re investigating a crime, you’re given a large area in which to start asking around, and there’s no x-ray vision to help you follow bloodstains. It all feels refreshingly manual, and the world doesn’t wait for you; at one point, I had to get to a
house to prevent a murder, but arrived to find the doors open and my rescuee already dead. The world keeps turning.
HARSH REALITIES
Warhorse sometimes overextends its commitment to a realistic, tactile experience. The fact that even opening doors is animated slows down an experience that can already feel unwieldy (it’s all too easy to get stuck on stairs or other bits of terrain). Then there’s the save system, which requires you to sleep or buy a beverage – a bit rich for a game that has its share of stability issues.
The combat, based on stamina and targeting body parts, is novel but struggles to cope in many scenarios. It works for duels, but there is no satisfying way to fight more than one enemy at once, and larger-scale battles descend into a mess of incoherent targeting.
But for me, such flaws are forgivable in a complex systems-based world that breaks with many of the comforts we’ve become used to in modern RPGs. There are some serious performance issues at the time of writing, but Warhorse is responding quickly, and doesn’t seem like a studio that will let its massive five-year project be undone by technicalities.
With that benefit of doubt in mind, Kingdom Come is a game of staggering detail, both as an RPG and as a game world. It’ll frustrate you before rewarding you, and not entirely by design, but break through and you’ll emerge onto one of the richest, rawest RPG experiences of recent years.
VERDICT
A veraciously detailed RPG that sometimes forsakes fun in the name of ‘realism’. Find your feet in this harsh world, however, embrace the way it ditches RPG convention, and you may just come to love it. Robert Zak