Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is the follow-up to developer Warhorse Studio’s debut game, which released back in 2018. Set in 15th Century Bohemia (now called the Czech Republic), you play as Henry, the son of a blacksmith who, after his hometown is raided, gets caught up in the wider medieval world of political intrigue, sword fighting and pastoral beauty.
The original game was defined by its realism and jankiness. As Henry, you had to make sure you eat, rest, and repair your gear. If someone witnesses you stealing or attacking someone, you’ll be appropriately punished, and so on. Seven years later, the sequel follows much the same blueprint. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is first-person, open-world game with dialogue choices to make, skill trees to specialise in, and many a side quest to embark on. It’s undeniably bigger and more complicated in every conceivable way, but is it better?
Picking up right where the first game left off, Henry and his lord/bro Hans Capon have been sent on a diplomatic mission to a new region. Shortly after arriving, they’re set upon by bandits, escaping with their lives but otherwise losing everything they own. They’re turned away from the nearby castle, assumed to be vagabonds. Thus begins the first act of Kingdom Come II. You’re in a new land with no money, no weapons and no horse. You have an overall goal – get invited to a nobleman’s wedding – but in terms of how best to go about doing that? The game basically says, “off you go, good luck!”
Much like the first game, this is where Kingdom Come II’s biggest strength lies. The world is extremely dynamic, immersive and realistic due to the large amount of bespoke mechanics, skills that improve the more you engage with them (i.e. the more time you spend riding a horse the better you will become at riding a horse) and hyperrealistic environments.
Everything about this game is dense. Visually, the way landscapes roll out before you is stunning. Creeks choked with fallen trees, tiny foot trails winding their way up a grassy hill, the subdued orange hues of a dusk sky over a pristine pond. Every farm and settlement is ridiculously detailed with gardens, outhouses, stacks of firewood, chicken coops, wells, stables and more. Everything makes sense, with paths, fences, houses etc all placed exactly where you would expect in a town or farm that had expanded naturally over time.
This density is in the mechanics too. What clothes Henry wears and what state they’re in (covered in mud or blood, for example) impacts how people respond to you, and in some cases whether they will talk to you at all. You have to maintain your armour, clothes and shoes, keep your blade sharp, eat food and get enough rest.
Classic RPG professions like alchemy and blacksmithing here are multi-stage mini-games in their own right. To craft a potion, you must gather and then grind up herbs, boil the cauldron, and distil the final product into a phial. Forging steel involves pumping the bellows in order to heat up the metal, and then hammering it out evenly.
If all of this sounds like an entire second life, then you’re not wrong, but it’s by design. Warhorse Studios have clearly set out to create the most detailed and immersive medieval RPG ever, and I think perhaps they have. But is it any fun? All this density, in terms of how unforgiving the world and its mechanics are, makes progression absurdly rewarding.
Even something as simple as finding a few coins, a pair of boots or a new sword feels like a triumph. Coming across a couple of bandits and scrappily dispatching them, narrowly avoiding death, and stealing their armour feels wonderful specifically because you know it will make your (second) life that tiny bit easier.
That said, this is a double-edged sword. The same mechanics that make this game so immersive and realistic, can just as easily lead to frustration and tedium. Kingdom Come II offers a lot of verbs (you can race horses, learn new combat moves, pick locks, herbs and pockets, play dice, brew potions and forge weapons), but all of these things start to lose their sheen 30+ hours in. Furthermore, the main story campaign is peppered with these activities too, they’re not just found in side quests or out in the open world, so you won’t avoid these tasks forever.
The crime system can also be frustrating. A lot of the side and main quests require you to be stealthy, and if you’re caught in the wrong place by a guard, you will be instantly flagged as a criminal in that town. You can try and charm or intimidate your way out of these arrests, but it’s not easy, especially early on.
Punishments for being caught comitting a crime range from paying a fine or being stuck in a pillory, whipped, or even branded. Each of these gives you a significant debuff that lasts at least a day, making combat or any other stat-check something to avoid. Branding permanently marks you as a criminal, making people treat you differently for the rest of your play through (as I understand it, I most certainly reloaded my last save when this happened to me).
The save system is similarly unforgiving. You can save if you sleep in a bed you own, drink a specific potion, or save and quit the game, but there is no quick saving. So when I accidentally sliced a man enjoying a nice cold ale at the local tavern after a hard day right in front of his community and several armed guards, I couldn’t just reload a save without losing hours of progress. As time goes on this becomes less of a problem as you get more money and by extension more reliable places to sleep, but still, beware!
The main campaign is riddled with pacing issues. There are scripted sequences, whether it’s a fort under siege or an ambush in a forest, but they always seem to clash with the aforementioned realism. Because of how handcrafted these set pieces are, and how dynamic the open world is in comparison, they end up feeling pantomime. This was an issue in the first game too, all the big climactic battles failed to impress.
Main story quests are frequently padded out with what feels like busywork, and this is where the tedium really sets in. Right when the narrative picked up, and I was feeling engaged and keen to see what was going to happen next, the game would grind to a halt and make me do something riveting like loading sacks onto a wagon or digging some graves.
Putting issues of pacing aside, the narrative itself is convoluted. I can only assume it follows actual historical figures and events, but as far as making a compelling arc for Henry and friends, not so much. Endless names of lords and kings and burghers and criminals and warlords and castles and nation states and enemies and allies get thrown at you in long expository dialogue scenes. What seems like pivotal plot developments are rushed past, and characters Henry has only just met treat him like a battle-bonded blood brother. So little of it feels earned.
Indeed, from around the midpoint onwards, I found it difficult to care all that much about the story. Kingdom Come II begins with clear goals and some intriguing hooks, but it all fizzles away, leaving what feels like fan fiction written by someone who read a few Wikipedia articles about 15th Century Czech history.
Some readers may be aware of the controversy surrounding director and lead writer of both Kingdom Come games, Daniel Vavra. I vaguely recall feeling icky about the way women were treated in the first game, and so I was curious to see if things had changed in the sequel. While it is true there is now a woman among the main cast (Katherine, a spy who poses as an ale- or housemaid as appropriate), she is the exception to the rule. Overall, women take a backseat in Kingdom Come II, especially in the main story.
To some extent given the time period this makes sense, however they’re also objectified and treated as a punchline far too often. There are cutscenes where main characters, men we’re clearly supposed to find endearing, ogle women as they walk past. One of Katherine’s first scenes features a solider slapping her on the bum, and there are lots of jokes that basically amount to men shaking their heads and sighing “ah, women, am I right?”
The vast majority of female characters in the game with fleshed out dialogue are “Bath House Wenches”, or in other words, sex workers. Look, obviously 15th Century Medieval Europe wasn’t a good time to be a woman. And obviously, sex work has been around for a long, long time. But there is a discernible difference, to me at least, between accurately depicting a historical period that did not treat women well, and coming across like you’re revelling in it.
Far too often during my time with Kingdom Come II, it felt like I was being winked at down the camera. Being invited to remember the good old days when men were men and women were women. The men get drunk, swear and are generally gross, and get in fights. The women are defined by their appearance, mostly. Either they’re a wizened old herb lady, a young and buxom “bath wench”, or a timid daisy. Even if I were to give the team – and it’s Gamergate-supporting lead writer – the benefit of the doubt, the script just feels outdated. It’s like watching a movie from 20 years ago that is way more problematic than you remembered.
So, a bit of a mixed bag. There is plenty to love here, if you can look past the warts. With Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Warhorse Studios have successfully created one of the most detailed, beautiful and deep medieval RPGs ever. It builds upon the foundation of the first game, adding more stuff to do, more wide open fields to traverse, and a whole second life to invest in.
The experience is brought down by a number of issues, however. The many complex mechanics simply cannot remain fun and engaging for the entire runtime, the main story drags and meanders in equal measure, and the way women are treated makes it feel like “a game out of time” at best, and plain old sexist at worst. For those willing to wade through the quagmire, there is a worthwhile game here, but in the year of our lord 2025, I wouldn’t blame you for spending your time and money elsewhere.
Rating: 7.5/10
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II was reviewd on PC using a code provided by the publisher.