In thisKingdom Come Deliverance 2 Review, I’m going to be talking about my hands-on time with the game. I just completed it a couple of weeks ago. I also finished almost every singleside questortaskin the game, so I have a pretty good idea of how this game plays. It clocked in for me at about 100 hours, almost exactly on the nose. So I think you’re probably going to get somewhere between 80 to 120 hours out of this game, depending on how you play it. But let’s get into what this game is and what I like about it. Spoiler alert, this is one of the best games I have played in a very long time.
Story And Setting Overview
So first, let’s talk about the story and setting of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. This is the strongest aspect of the game. It was the strongest aspect of the original title as well, no surprise there. The game is a direct sequel to the first game. If you haven’t played that game, there is a recap at the beginning that sort of goes through the events of that game. But I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary to have played the first game to play this one. And I think if you haven’t played that, you can play this just fine. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 picks up after the events of the first title in 1400 Bohemia with Henry’s quest for revenge and an attempt to drive Sigismund out of Hungary and the events that follow.
The countryside is once again one of the main attractions of this title. It’s so beautiful. Riding around the 1400s Bohemia, seeing the forests and the rivers and the fields. It’s just kind of surreal, honestly. You can spend a lot of time just doing that, fucking off and doing whatever you want. And a lot of times you’re not even doing a quest objective, you’re just riding around and seeing what you can do. And it’s amazing how much immersion and how cathartic it is just doing that in this game.
Main Story And Quests
Talking about the story of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 without getting into any spoilers at all, I really enjoyed it. It’s a very exciting and action-packed story. It made me angry. It nearly made me cry once, but mostly it made me laugh a lot. I laughed a lot in this game. War Horse has a phenomenal sense of storytelling and a wicked sense of humor, to say the least. Some scenes in this game are just hilarious, just like the first game. If you’ve played that one, you know what I’m talking about. And you’re able to expect a dozen, two dozen moments like that in this game where you’re just looking at your screen and you’re laughing because it’s so funny.
The main story of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is another big highlight of this title. And it’s so compelling that when you’re playing it, you just accidentally keep going down the main storyline. And before you know it, you’ve done three or four quests, your whole day is gone, and you haven’t even done any side quests. And you’re like, “Oh crap, I probably ought to do some of those before I finish this game”. I think there are a lot of players out there that are going to be playing this title that may not even see a lot of the side quests before they finish the main quest. Because it is just so compelling and pulls you in like a good book or something like that. It’s just one of those things that there’s a point in the story where you’re able to’t stop playing the game. It’s just you have to find out what happened next. You want to be a part of it. You want to see the events unfold. And I was just blown away by it.
Now that’s not to say there aren’t some very excellent side quests as well, because there are. There are some absolutely phenomenal side quests in this game. Most of them are rife with humor, including setting up a brothel. You get to explore a mine where there’s a strange creature living inside that’s haunting the locals. And you also get to figure out who’s murdering all the local young women in Kuttenberg, Jack the Ripper style. So there are some very fun things that you can do in the side quests as well. And I would urge you that even if you’re really enjoying the main quest, make sure that you do some of the side quests as well. Because there are some bangers in there.
There are, however, many filler quests and tasks as well in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Some of them can feel quite mundane and repetitive by the end. Some of them are really long without much payoff or much interest. And honestly, when I was playing, I almost wished that I had a list of which quests I should do and which quests I should skip. Because I’d say probably like a third or somewhere in there of the quests in this game are just filler that you don’t really need to do. But the main quest and a bunch of the side quests are absolutely fantastic.
General Gameplay And Combat
Moving on a little bit to the gameplay, let’s get into how this game plays. The main gameplay is very similar to the first game. If you’ve seen any gameplay footage leading up to the reviews, you probably know this. You accept quests to help disrupt Sigismund’s plans while also helping the locals with everyday occurrences. Well, maybe not everyday occurrences since there’s a war going on, but you get the idea. A lot of these are things that would happen anyway, but there are also a lot of things that are affected by the war. You see people in the landscape trying to survive and you’re trying to help them get through this very tough time in Bohemia.
The combat of this title remains a sore point in my estimation. A lot of people are going to wonder if the combat in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is an improved version of the first game. It feels very similar to me. You end up relying on master strikes predominantly if you’re using a longsword like I did in my playthrough. Or you just mash R1, frankly, or right-click on your mouse. There isn’t a lot of strategy. The hitboxes don’t seem to work a lot of the time. A lot of times, there are a lot of combos in this game that you’re supposed to be able to pull off with your weapons, but most of the time you just get blocked and interrupted so you can’t pull them off.
I’m not even sure what the point of a combo system is since most of the time you don’t end up doing one anyway. Honestly, by the end of the game, I was just mashing left-click as fast as I could on every enemy that I saw, except maybe when I was outnumbered like 5 to 1. And then I would just wait and do master strikes and I would win every fight. So there isn’t a lot to combat in this game. Combat is not the main focus of this game. You shouldn’t be playing it for the combat, but I was hoping for some improvement and it doesn’t feel like it’s gotten better really at all.
Henry has a lot of progression in this game. When I did our first impressions video a few weeks ago, I mentioned that it feels like Henry really sucks at stuff. There’s an event that happens at the beginning of the game that sets him back from his progress and what you made in the first game that sort of lore-wise explains why he’s set back. And he definitely sucks for a little bit at the beginning, but I will say by the end of the game, he is just handing out ass-kickings left and right. He is absolutely devastating by the end of the game, and I would say probably a lot of people Especially after the first 20 to 30 hours of the game, you really start feeling Henry get a lot stronger through the progression system, which is basically based on the actions that you do in the game.
As you use certain weapons, as you do certain activities, you gain proficiency in them, not unlike something like Oblivion or Skyrim or something like that. And you definitely feel Henry getting stronger throughout the game, so I really like that. The quests are the main activity that you’re going to be doing when you aren’t exploring. A lot of them have multiple outcomes and can be solved many different ways. You can fail them if you do things like maybe murder somebody in one of the quests that you shouldn’t have. That happened to me a few times.
Game Mechanics
But there’s a lot of things that you can do. For instance, if you’re tasked with helping someone and then you go talk to someone else and they say, no, this person’s really the bad guy, you often get put in a situation where you have to decide who you want to help, and I do enjoy that as it makes you really think about what you’re doing in a quest rather than just following the quest line and having the decisions made for you.
And the crime system in the game is absolutely amazing. The fact that you can steal from people, murder people, get away with it, or get caught. I really like immerse myself in this a lot when at the beginning of the game, just seeing how far I could push it. Had a lot of fun doing that got it out of my system and then started playing the game a lot more traditionally after that. But I really enjoy the fact that it’s there for people who want to use it to their advantage. I definitely lockpicked a lot. I definitely killed a random person here and there just so I could see what loot they had. It can give you a leg up early on when you need equipment and gold. I really like that system in this game and I think it has a lot of fun to it.
Something I’ll just comment on before I wrap up the gameplay section is that Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and Kingdom Come Deliverance 1 have this attempt at realism and immersion that borders repetitiveness and mundane. That is to say that when you go to repair your weapon, you have to repair it. When you go to craft something, you have to craft it. And when you’re going on a quest to do something and there’s an objective like carrying sacks of grain, you have to carry them and you’re slow. Things like this really add to the immersion of the game. It makes you feel like you’re actually doing the things that would be happening during this time period or what is expected of you from the quest objectives. But sometimes it’s a bit of a double-edged sword where it feels like, why am I carrying sacks for five minutes? Like I had an hour to play this and I spent five of my minutes just carrying sacks really slowly, which can be boring. But I will say for the most part, I think they nailed this. It feels more immersive and real than it does repetitive most of the time. There are definitely some points in the game where that repetitiveness and mundaneness can creep in. And I think it’s going to vary a little bit from player to player, how much of that they enjoy and how much of that they dislike.
Audiovisuals And Design
Moving along to audiovisual and design, the voice acting in Kingdom Deliverance is some of the best in the industry. It’s absolutely fantastic. It’s what makes the game so good. Even with the good storytelling and the good story, if the voice acting was bad, it would absolutely ruin this game. But since it’s so good, you want to listen to every character speak. There are so many voice lines in this game. I heard it was more than Baldur’s Gate 3 actually, like breaking the record, which is incredible and I really enjoy it. I do wish maybe they had a little bit more variety in terms of voice actors. They seem to use the same ones a lot. I can sort of understand that given how many voice lines there are and how many characters there are. But I wish they’d had maybe 20 to 25% more voice actors in this game because you do notice that some of the main characters of the title do have the same voice, and it’s a bit weird sometimes.
Facial animations and body language are stiff here and there. It looks like it’s not synced or buggy in some places. And then in other places, it’s absolutely phenomenal. It looks completely natural. The scenes look great. So it’s a mixed bag here and there, and sometimes you get an outstanding scene in this regard and sometimes just a bit janky. It doesn’t ruin the overall feeling of the game, but it isn’t consistent for sure.
The music of the game is absolutely mind-blowingly good. It’s so fantastic, the music of this. I was lucky enough to hear the orchestra that does the music for this game live in Prague. That was amazing. And the way they’ve done the music at certain parts in the main story and side quests, it just gives you goosebumps. You get goosebumps when you’re watching it like you’re watching some epic movie and that scene comes on and like the hairs on your arms just stand up. That will happen to you multiple times in this game, and a lot of that is because of the music and the right music at the right moment.
Performance-wise, the game ran rather smoothly for me, averaging around, I’d say, 90 to 100 FPS on a 3080 Ti with a 12900K processor. It dipped below 60 FPS only once. It was a nighttime scene where there are lots of fire torches out, and I think the fire effects slowed the game down for a second. But other than that, I had zero dips below 60 FPS in about 100 hours of gameplay, which is pretty incredible considering how much open world there is to this game, especially since you have the area of Kuttenberg that has hundreds and hundreds of NPCs in it, and I had no problems in that area either.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, though, does have a fair number of bugs. I will say it is much less than the original title. Most were unimpactful on my gameplay as a whole, so they didn’t really stop me from playing. There were rare occasions where a quest bugged out and didn’t work, but 99% of the time when that happened, just reloading from my last save fixed it. So I didn’t have anything game-breaking. I was able to complete every single quest that I did. Sometimes I just had to reload once. I’d say it was less than a handful over 100 hours, so that’s pretty good. Nonetheless, there are some bugs here. I do expect a lot of these to be fixed. I expect there to be a day-one patch where they improve some of these things. I was playing almost a month before the game came out, so some of these things I’m sure are getting polished up. I also had two crashes in the 100 hours or so that I played, which I think is more than fine. It didn’t really ruin or affect my gameplay in any way.
Replayability And Other Things To Know
When it comes to the replayability of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, there is some replayability to be had in the game as there are important decisions that impact outcomes, but it’s really hard to say how much actually changes without seeing everything. It feels like I can’t quite get a clear understanding of what makes certain outcomes happen, and it seems like a lot of the big choices, the most impactful ones, happen near the end of the game, so you could just make a case for replaying, like, the last 10 hours or so of your first playthrough, and you could probably get most of the replay value from a decision standpoint out of that.
There’s little to no build variety in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 since you have enough perk points if you max out every stat and every skill to get every perk, and combat isn’t a motivating factor in replaying this game because the combat isn’t very good at all. So you’re not gonna replay it to play a different build style of combat because it’s basically the same no matter what you do, so that’s not really a reason to replay it. I don’t expect too many people to replay this game more than once. There are, of course, hardcore players out there who’ll keep playing it for a long time, but I expect most people to play one really solid, lengthy, explore-everything-type playthrough and be very satisfied with that.
In terms of the price point, the game is priced just fine for what you’re receiving. It’s definitely gonna be one of the best titles in 2025, particularly in the RPG space. I think it’s well worth the price, even on day one, even with some bugs here and there. Absolutely think you’re getting what you paid for here.
Final thoughts
Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is a no-brainer for those looking for complete immersion in a medieval fantasy and who enjoy good storytelling and a dialogue with a lot of curse words. A lot. As I mentioned earlier, I couldn’t stop playing the game once I reached a certain point, and it was like a good book that I just couldn’t put down because I had to see what happens next. And frankly, I haven’t felt that way about a game since Baldur’s Gate 3. If you’re wondering if Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is worth it, it absolutely is. Warhorse has hit another absolute home run here with this game, and it’ll be interesting to see what comes next for Warhorse. They’ve already announced a roadmap for Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 over the course of the year, adding other features to the game. But it does feel like, from a story standpoint, that the journey of Kingdom Come has come to an end, and it’s anyone’s guess where they’ll go from here. Will they do more medieval Bohemian stories? Or maybe will they dabble a little bit in the fantasy genre in a similar type way? It’ll be curious to see what they do.
With stellar storytelling, top notch voice acting, and much more polish than its predecessor, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a return to form for the RPG genre, and will likely be one of the best titles this year. Warhorse has proven they can elevate their formula to even greater heights, and I cannot wait to see what they do next. A day 1 buy for any RPG fan, especially those that enjoy true role playing.
