Summary
Kingdom Come: Deliveranceends with Henry and Sir Hans Capon (alongside an armed entourage) entering the wooded regions of the Trosky estate. Now, seven years later, they finally exit those woods inKingdom Come: Deliverance 2. The sequel picks up directly where the last game ended, so while it has been years for fans of the franchise, it’s been weeks or so forKCD2protagonist Henryand his comrades. This fun little time transition comes with a major benefit for the franchise: players who enjoyed the first game’s story are likely to enjoy the sequel, with an added six years' worth of technical work thrown into the mix.
Indeed,Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2is a sequel of iteration, not evolution. Developer Warhorse Studios has essentially summed up the game as “bigger and better” since day one, and that’s pretty clear in its design. The “bigger” is easier to see because there’s a new story, two maps in the Bohemian Paradise and Kuttenberg regions, an entire living and breathing city thrown in that mix, and new additions like crossbows and early firearms. However, it would seem that the “better” is the strongest keyword here. Game Rant recently attended theKingdom Come: Deliverance 2preview event in Kutná Hora (Kuttenberg), where we were able to check out two segments of the game: the opening hours and then Kuttenberg later in the game.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Prologue
This section contains spoilers for the prologue; for those who’d prefer to go in fresh, please skip to the next section.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2begins by putting players into the shoes of Father Godwin, thesupporting priest ofKCD1. We are tasked with repelling a castle siege, using our crossbow to take out enemies as they prepare to charge the gate, putting more bolts into them at the gate, and fighting on the battlements as enemies scale it with siege ladders. It’s a brief tutorial to refresh players on the combat ofKingdom Come: Deliverance, ending with a strong cliffhanger: Sir Hans has been hit. The game then returns to the past, with players stepping into the shoes of Henry once more as they march toward Trosky Castle.
This portion of the prologue lets us make a couple ofkey decisions that define who our Henry is, while seeing players establish a past rapport with Sir Hans. This translates to key stats for our then-level 15 character. Not long into this section, we come across some men of Otto von Bergow on the field. They circled us, claiming to be hunting bandits (ahh, foreshadowing). We revealed who we were, which didn’t improve the situation much because, as we learned, Otto von Bergow had aligned with the overarching antagonist, Sigismund. We were presented with a couple of options, with the persuasion feature being explained as also taking into account how someone is dressed. We could have played it more aggressively, but since we looked and fit the part, we went for more diplomatic options. We’re not sure how drastically different decisions change this setup, but it ended with us positively going our separate ways.
Because we would not reach Trosky Castle by nightfall, Sir Hans called for us to set up camp there on the river’s edge. This allowed us to talk with our companions, find a way to feed our dog, and get anotherKCD2combat tutorial on perfect blocksand ripostes with Sir Hans. Afterward, we sat around the camp reminiscing with the others, once again letting us fill in some holes in our history with the characters. Then, Sir Hans insists he and Henry take a quick bath in the river.
In the water, we hear the siren’s call: women slightly down the river. We make our way there, sneaking past someone washing clothes, when we see a trio of women in the water. Then, the foreshadowing hits: our camp has been attacked by the aforementioned bandits. We watched helplessly as those we just shared a meal with were slaughtered, and then the bandits turned to the women. Sir Hans insists we escape amid the chaos, but good guy Henry can’t resist telling the bandits to leave the women alone. One of the women wears a blue dress, which is a notable detail. For now, though, the bandits turn their attention to us as we attempt to swim to the other bank.
Sir Hans is an excellent swimmer, Henry not so much. He flounders next to Sir Hans, which is somewhat funny to watch, but it’s also the reason we’re hit by an arrow before hitting the bank. The bandits had circled around rather quickly, meaning we had to sneak by them, and then run from them near the end. As we almost escape by moving up the rocky hillside, a bandit finds us, and we end up in a naked fight for our life. It ends with both of us toppling over the edge, and in this chaos, we also lose our dog. Sir Hans finds us and tries to carry us to safety, but the near-death experience has Henry hallucinating.
We see our deceased father, live through flashbacks from the first game (the burning of Skalitz, the death of our parents, the thirst for vengeance, the loss of our father’s sword, etc.), and eventually make it to safety in an old woman’s shack. This segment does a good job of catching anyone who has perhaps not playedKingdom Come Deliverance 1up to speed, and when we get to the shack, Sir Hans is also injured by one of the bandits. Sir Hans does manage to kill this enemy, however. The old woman manages to patch us up, but since Sir Hans is now in bad shape and we used the last of her resources, we are tasked with finding someherbs to make a potion(which is followed by a tutorial) and burying the corpse of the bandit.
When we return with the herbs, a couple of men posing as von Berlow’s approach and claim to be hunting bandits. We had to redo this section a couple of times becauseKingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s combatwas not going in our favor since we had no real weapons, but we did manage to talk our way out of it by picking the right options. Afterward, once Sir Hans was healed, we spoke with the old woman and her now-returned daughter before setting out for Trosky Castle. It cuts to the journey, showing us plenty of landscapes in the area, and soon we’re at the castle. Oh, but we’re bad mailmen and lost the letter verifying us as messengers and granting us entrance to the castle. We are turned away from the gate, but not before Sir Hans is covered in the filth of a chamber pot - really nailing a strongMonty Pythonvibe.
We found ourselves in a nearby village, Sir Hand still messy if as washed as possible, and we managed to order some food. When we can’t pay, Sir Hans volunteers our labor - which we argue with him about because he won’t help. Before we get the task from the server, we see the woman from the river and ask her about getting into the Castle (as she is there seeking wine for the men). Although she pretends to not know us and pretends she wasn’t at the river, which is intriguing, she does inform us of an upcoming wedding that Otto von Berlow will attend. We have an in, but first, we end up carrying huge bags of flour from a cart to the basement. Before we finish that task, however, Sir Hans picks a fight with one of the commoners. We end up in stockades, we end up arguing as Sir Hans begins to throw a Nobleman fit belonging to a two year old, and he ends up going out on his own. We finally enterKingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s open worldwith two tasks ahead of us: securing an invite to the wedding and, as importantly, finding our lost dog.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 - An Hour in Kuttenberg
We did get to spend a little time exploring the open world, but before long, we moved to a later save set up inthe city of Kuttenberg. We didn’t get nearly as much time here, but it was much more open in its gameplay than the understandably more on-rail prologue. We were free to explore the city as we completed a side quest between two sword-fighting brotherhoods. In short, this quest saw us navigate the politics of sword-fighting and issuances from the king (in his absence), saw us side with one school and later get admitted to it, saw us sneak and steal the opposing brotherhoods' symbolic challenge sword, and use that tactic to get us into a tournament where, after much drama, we won and our school was the official brotherhood of the city.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Seemingly Bets Big on “Bigger and Better”
The firstKingdom Come: Deliverancewas by no means a bad game, but it was very much one of those games that clicked with someone or didn’t. It is rated as"Fair" on OpenCritic, with a Top Critic Rating of 72 and 48% of critics recommending it, reflecting that split in the game. It seems fair to say, in broad strokes, thatKingdom Come Deliverance’s story, small details, and worldbuilding were praised, but its gameplay could feel janky and clunky, while the game featured severe technical bugs at launch. Its approach to immersion was also divisive: while some enjoyed how step-by-step it was, others felt like it took away from the experience.
Comparing our short time with the sequel to the original, it does truly feel better. The story is just as engaging, if not more so. While the prologue was a bit slow (for personal tastes), it did a great job of bringing us into the story, establishing possible past characterizations, and providing background info for those who didn’t play the first game. Indeed, Warhorse Studios PR Manager Tobias Stolz-Zwilling described it as agame more likeRed Dead Redemption 2thanSkyrim, and that holds up for us in terms of pacing and play style. Where it really shined for us was the gameplay.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2doesn’t feel like a massive overhaul, but it is a refined iteration. In fact, the changes to combat don’t even seem obvious to the naked eye, but it did feel much more intuitive and a lot less clanky. We quickly found ourselves enjoying the rhythmic combat more so than we ever did inKCD1. The step-by-step approach to activities like alchemy (take a pinch of this, put it in the cauldron, heat it in the cauldron for an amount of time determined by flipping an hourglass, add another pinch of this, light boil, pour into a vial) are, again, a bit slow for us, but outside the opening hours, we doubt it’s something we have to involve ourselves in too much. And that’s the beauty of its immersive approach: those who enjoy such thorough activities are rewarded tenfold and those who don’t aren’t really punished.
Immersion for me, in a game like this, comes through history and that is so layered throughout the game that it’s hard not to stop and smell the roses. Thehistorical building designs in Kuttenberg, the simple shop set-ups, and the open fields all feel so welcoming and so immersive that stepping away from the game when the event was over was hard.
The Elephant in the Kingdom
Of course, it’s important to address the elephant in the room. When Kingdom Come: Deliverancewas first released, it was criticized heavily for the number of technical bugs, with the Xbox version (the one I played) seemingly receiving the worst of it. Those bugs ran the gamut: crashes, mechanics not working properly, bugged quests, forced fail states, NPCs acting erratically, graphic issues, and much, much more. It’s rare that I step away from a game due to bugs, as none that I remember were exactly game-breaking, but they were gratuitous in volume. Luckily, it seems that “Better” applies here too. I returned toKCD1after some bugs were fixed, and those lessons seemed to translate here as the experience was much smoother overall.
However, it’s worth noting that this was a preview build, meaning the game is not yet complete, and there were still bugs that I encountered. For example, when encountering the woman on the river, I didn’t know which path we were supposed to take. I threw a rock down one, and lo and behold, it was the one we headed down. Once we made it to a certain point, she spotted us and began screaming and running. We didn’t fail that part of the mission, however, and it was just a slightly odd but kind of funny stealth moment where she’s running by us screaming as we sneak like she doesn’t see us. Another time, in Kuttenberg, the camera decided Henry and the NPCs we were talking with didn’t exist and that the ground in Kuttenberg was very interesting. However, that’s pretty much it. Nothing we encountered was immersion or game-breaking and, more or less, fell into the category offunny open-world bugs.
Thy Kingdom Come
If the entire game lives up to our preview experience, then it will still likely remain an ostracizing game: some will love it and some will leave it. However, that indicates a strong design ethos. It won’t be for everyone, but it will, no doubt, be someone’s favorite game.Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2proves that the franchise has its own identity, one that has only grown over the past several years. It knows its target audience, and by now, its target audience knows it. IfKingdom Come: Deliverance 2delivers on what we experienced and fully lives up to its “Bigger and Better” approach, then it could be a sequel that surpasses its predecessor.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2releases February 11 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X. Game Rant was provided travel and lodging for the purposes of this preview.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
WHERE TO PLAY
Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is an exhilarating Action RPG, set amidst the chaos of a civil war in 15th Century Bohemia.You are Henry of Skalitz – an ordinary man doing extraordinary things – caught in a gripping tale of revenge, betrayal, and discovery as he embarks on an epic journey, ‘from a humble blacksmith’s forge to the court of Kings’, searching for purpose in this beautiful but brutal medieval world.From bustling city streets to lush forests, explore this open-world Medieval Europe through an unforgettable adventure filled with action, thrills, and wonder.
