Kingdom Come: Deliverance - Ultimate Review (500+ Hrs Played) - YouTube

Kingdom Come: Deliverance, for those of you who might not know, is an open-world

medieval RPG that starts you on the bottom rung in a way I don't think I've

experienced since learning to read and write my own name. Which comes to mind

because one of the many skills you must spend in-game time learning in kcd is

reading. Yep... your character cannot read when the game begins. Warhorse studios

have gone for a whole new level of realism in the medieval RPG genre and

what's more real than a common blacksmith's son, whom no one outside his

tiny village either knows or cares about. No golden child, no beam of light

overhead, no legendary Witcher, Dragon Hunter, or forgotten young wizard under

the stairs. Henry of Skalitz is is just an ordinary young boy who can barely even

lift the sword his father has just finished making for a local nobleman,

much less swing it when the game begins. Radzig: "You still have a lot to learn" he would

probably live out the rest of his presumably fairly short life in complete

obscurity in the same little village where he was born

if history hadn't just written through it with a thousand of its angriest

soldiers and burned it to the ground I say history because this game is

steeped in it it's places are real places many of its characters were real

people or in some cases loosely based on real people at least and many of the

events she will live through as Henry of Scarlets were taken right out of the

pages of the Czech Republic's long and brutal history silvus calots where the

game begins really was burned to the ground by the invading forces of

Sigismund of Hungary on March 23rd 14:03 unfortunately that is the very day

warhorse studios give you control of the luckless Henry and his unremarkable

frame so your village is burning your parents and friends have been murdered

and those same murderers are making their way up the hill towards you Henry

can't read he knows nothing of warfare he can barely lift a sword or stay on a

horse which is precisely why the first real mission in this game is called run

if I'm being completely honest Henry is so useless at this early stage

that it took me three attempts to even run away without getting killed so you

can believe me when I tell you that even basic skills in this game really feel

earned swords really feel sort of heavy until you get a hang of them after

intensive training and you must train intensively if you want to master any of

the skills in Kingdom Come deliverance particularly weaponry rog fire will

nosedive after a few feet at first not but it matters because there is no

aiming reticle for archery so you'll be lucky to hit a bunny with an arrow even

if you get close enough to push them through its fluffy little face if you

don't believe me check out the video of me trying to hunt

hares on day three of my first playthrough Kingdom Come deliverance

I'll put the link in the description below well that was awful I didn't

imagine a village yokel like you would have much skill but you fail to meet

even my low expectations even Henry speech options are noticeably poorer at

the beginning lacking the finesse in the early stages to respond to tough

questions with anything more witty than yer well you've mo so they're to be

perfectly honest I'm hesitant to say it feels

like learning to walk for fear that warhorse Studios will make you learn to

do that in the next game it honestly wouldn't surprise me if psychologists

ten years from now are prescribing medication for those of us console

players who were emotionally scarred by K CDs early lock-picking mechanic and

we're never really the same again one of the very early patches for this game

tweaked the console lockpick problem just enough to keep you from losing your

mind completely but even the improved version squeezed your so hard against

the fragile glass wall of sanity that you could hear it cracking and your

first fear instinct was to lick it better what may be that last part was

just me but the fact remains if you weren't a die-hard RPG fanatic an OCD

sufferer or just so damn stubborn you were determined to get your 50 pounds

worth of it killed you and everyone else in your building you might have given up

at this point FPS players probably tuned out the moment they found out they

wouldn't get to kill anything at all for at least an hour

what the pickpocketing mechanic was confusing and difficult sneaking without

getting caught virtually impossible in the early stages the list goes on

suffice it to say Kingdom Come deliverance does not hold your hand just

don't get in anyone's way don't go too far and come back here when you're done

many things you just have to figure out for yourself I spent more time in jail

than out of it during the first few days because no one mentioned that I had to

have a torch lit when walking around towns at night I honestly didn't realize

that a skill tree existed for the first three days of play but the elation I

felt once I figured out there are perk points to spend on improving your skills

was almost like the day I passed my driving test not a peep to anyone what

all of this staggering around in the dark does for you is to help you really

become Henry of Scarlets to identify with this lost and bewildered character

in a way I have never before experienced in a video game your hunger levels rise

slowly and you have to figure out how to feed yourself without stealing or at

least without getting caught stealing although as you'll quickly learn there

is a suspicious-looking orange goo which sits bubbling away in every kitchen and

on every campfire in a large pot all across this area of Bohemia where it

comes from I have no idea best not to ask but nobody seems to mind when you

eat it so go right ahead you become tired and your stamina and health levels

begin to drop unless you can find somewhere to sleep I was also thrown in

jail for sleeping in the wrong place fairly on in the game you even need to

wash yourself and have your clothes laundered from time to time so that

people don't turn their noses up at you in dialog they you'd be better off going

for a good scrub badger as the game progresses though these things that

seemed overwhelming at first becomes second nature like so many things in

real life and you feel like a real part of this living breathing beautiful world

that warhorse have created in such incredible detail occasionally their

attempts at natural behavior and NPCs are inconsistent and missed the mark by

some way in another video I'll link in the description below I was attacked

with a sword for forgetting to return a holy relic and only moments later the

same guard put away his sword and said God be with you before

during all my questions about who lived in the house he was grouting but these

moments pale into insignificance when compared with the brilliance of some of

the relationships that developed between characters in the game I can't mention

most of them for fear of story spoilers but there is one which begins to develop

early on in the game between Henry and spoiled young nobleman Sir Hans cape on

when we first meet young sir Han sees the archetypal young medieval Lord

arrogant spoiled selfish intolerant of anyone beneath him

you immediately dislike him and I was certain he was going to meet his end at

the point of my sword but Kingdom Come deliverance often

swerves around tired video game tropes at the last second veering off into the

woodland of unpredictability watching hedgehogs bounce off the windscreen and

into your dust like the uncomfortable spiky curled up cliches that they are

about yes I know I took that metaphor way too far the point is that this game

does not always do what is expected and it feels fresher for it

at an early point in the game a situation which both you and young sir

hands have been bullied into by the stand in Lord of rat I sparks a chain of

events that completely changes how Henry and Hans view one another is that so and

there's becomes the most natural friendship I think I've ever encountered

in a video game so much so that I was a bit disappointed I couldn't spend more

time hanging out with him than I did so next time you try to tell me I can't

kill a boar with an area he's just one of those guys who's fun to

hang out with but doesn't always seem to realize when a situation calls for a

more grown-up response he quite often find yourself rolling your eyes or doing

a facepalm moment and going no he says the wrong thing or does something that

you know for where he's gonna end up in one or the other of you getting

seriously injured or killed other revelations are at hand later in this

game but if you pay attention to dialogue achievement lists in particular

online and the behavior of certain characters they may not always take you

completely by surprise drinking will be the death of you

damn right is there any wine left for all my raving about the wonders of this

game though it is certainly not without its problems

Kingdom Come deliverance like so many sprawling open-world RPGs was plagued by

bugs upon release and odd problems persist but nowhere more so than on

consoles and if my limited online research into the resolution for these

problems is anything to go by no console was more problematic than the Xbox one

the most asthmatic of the platforms mentioned and unfortunately the only one

available to me at the time of the game's release this isn't to say the

others didn't suffer but it seems to me that after all the patches came in the

Xbox one players were the ones most commonly complaining about persistent

difficulties some of these were mild annoyances like NPCs walking through

objects and each other and horses some were downright hilarious like Henry

suddenly shooting up into the air whilst at an alchemy bench whereupon he just

keeps going up and up above the sprawling land of Bohemia as there was

being raptured by the baby Jesus but the worst of them by far was the infamous

halberd bug Hal birds were never implemented properly in this game from

the very start I picked one up from a bandit early on in my first playthrough

because the menu showed it was worth 1000 groschen which is the game's

currency but once picked up you can't put it away you can't sell it you can't

put it on your horse and everywhere you go people complain or just scream and

run because you're carrying a very large and completely useless pointy Pole

the halberd bug I'm speaking of though caused halbert's to randomly spawn in

places where guards had been but then they never D spawned and the game seemed

to keep track of them all times wherever they were in the world causing an

insanely glitchy juddering play experience and even after the latest

patch which is one point four point three at the time of recording many of

us were advised by warhorse that if you got the problem before the patch release

then the only way to get rid of it was to go back to a safe point before it

started happening well firstly when the was that I didn't go around counting how

birds in the dirt in case of later difficulties and secondly that's not so

easy when the problem arises 40 plus hours into your YouTube walkthrough

series which already takes pretty much all of your free time and YouTube are

breathing down your neck to maintain a regular schedule as all of us youtubers

know on top of this it really seems to me as though this game should never have

been released on the Xbox one and that's quite an indictment considering how much

I've loved this game and that the Xbox one is currently my only way to play and

record video games so I would never have had the pleasure of Henri's company had

it not been available to Xbox one players but it seems to me as though the

old Xbox one was just not up to the job even after all the patches and delays

and more patches texture maps often seemed to load with all the haste of an

overweight snail crossing a feel of broken glass to keep a particularly

painful dentist appointment in the heart of song thrush territory Kingdom Come

deliverance is a game offering a rich and diverse landscape steeped in history

with truly believable characters and sold on the back of its attention to

realistic detail so when you regularly encounter scenes like Headless thugs and

men with see-through torsos demanding money while standing on an invisible

drawbridge in front of a castle that looks like it was drawn on a cereal box

in crayon it really is not doing what it said on the tin the textures catch up

eventually but you have to go through all the stages of loading including the

bit where their head appears but looks like odo from deep space 9 and by the

time they start to look like normal people you've either moved on to the

next shop or stab them in their invisible faces and taken all the

textualist clothes this is the first game from developer

warhorse studios they have some experienced players on their team but it

is a brand new company trying to do something genuinely fresh and new

we gamers appreciate that sort of thing particularly RPG games so there was a

lot of goodwill and forgiveness for mistakes that must be easy to make on

your first lap around the block God knows I wouldn't want to try doing what

they just did and the fact that they came so close to providing a perfect

truly immersive role-playing experience has given us a lot of real hope for the

potential future of this new company but delays animations that would have looked

dated in a 90s game and bugs and glitches that would make even Bethesda

blush have used up almost their entire currency reserve as far as goodwill is

concerned an RPG gamers expect them to do a lot better next time when all the

torque of textualist trees and embarrassingly clunky animation is

forgotten for just a moment though what warhorse have produced here is a thing

of real beauty I'm in my 40s now and I've been an avid gamer since the days

of Jet Set Willy Frogger and hungry Horace but my love of movies is hard to

beat and only when I had completed rockstars Red Dead Redemption in 2010

did I first say immersive video games with music story and character that good

really could someday hammer the nails into the coffin later the movie industry

since 2010 I have seen other games come close but none quite so close as Kingdom

Come deliverance for an RPG series to live long it must be built on a solid

foundation it doesn't matter if the doors are falling off the hinges and the

roof leaks all those things can be fixed as long as it has a strong heart and

Kingdom Come deliverance has the heart of a rhino warhorse have done a stellar

job in my opinion concentrating on those things that go overlooked by too many

RPG games in favor of flawless graphics and a game map the size of a small moon

I have been a writer a reader a movie fan and a gamer all my life I'm a

professional voice-over artist nowadays reading for a living and indulging

myself with stories in all forms when I have free time so I'm pretty confident

that I know a good storyteller when I see one

and Kingdom Come deliverance director and lead writer Daniel vara is just such

a person four things really draw you into a game a movie or a TV series more

than anything else Kingdom Come deliverance hits all these

points with precision that's a lot all right one thing at a time the story is

fantastic and often takes you in a different direction than that you might

have been expecting the voice acting for the most part is brilliant there are a

few hiccups here in there lady Stephenie of town burg is a prime example I'm

sorry about that whoever voice ladies Stephanie but the

principal players deliver well within the confines of their character take it

from me it's no easy thing to step into a box and jump into a character when

there is often no one else in the to react to a fantastic score by yon

Volta and Adams porker really adds that extra rise and fall to moments of

importance

my lord you have my utmost

get off with you robot and lastly character I spoke at length

about Henry and hands cape on earlier but Henry really is the linchpin in all

of this without him the whole thing just falls apart and Henry of Scarlets is the

most interesting character I've ever played as I think and it is precisely

his ordinariness that makes him so likeable so relatable he is not heralded

as the greatest Archer or swordsman in the land nobody knows his name Jesus his

reputation does not precede him with you I'm Henry of scalice he isn't ruggedly

handsome or drop-dead gorgeous he isn't some jaded Dragon Slayer or

sorcerer coming out of retirement for one last mission he doesn't have

rippling abs or biceps you're afraid to get too close to for fear they might

explode in your face and he has a perfectly ordinary Midlands accent a

little odd to find a 15th century Bohemia along with York Sherman Aziz and

Americans all speaking perfect English of course but not all that unusual for

Tom McKay who is the voice behind Henry who comes from Solihull I cannot tell

you how many times I've been put off a main character because he opens his

mouth and out comes the voice of bad bird please stop doing this game

developpers it's really really irritating once you get past the age of

12 I thoroughly enjoyed becoming Henry of Scarlets and was genuinely sad when

the game came to an end but that end was a very Empire Strikes Back Mass Effect 2

style ending and War Horse of left is in very little doubt that Henry's story is

far from over I for one cannot wait to see what's next from this young game

studio but wherever they take us next let's just hope it's fully rendered

let's get to it

Kingdom Come deliverance is available on PC ps4 Xbox one X and Xbox one if you

haven't played it yet and you're thinking about where to go for your next

game I highly recommend it not quite so much on the Xbox one platform as I just

mentioned for all the reasons I just mentioned but certainly on PC if you

haven't got it already and from everything I've read ps4 actually holds

up quite well as well an Xbox one X is supposed to be superb way to play this

game but that's it for this review if you want more game reviews more game

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