Kingdom Come will not have us slaying dragons or saving humanity, instead choosing to cast the player as a nobody caught in the middle of a conflict he’d rather skip than face head on. Developed by Warhorse Studios, a team of industry veterans with beloved titles such as Mafia 1 and 2 under their belt, this new game is the closest thing we can get to a modern first person CRPG. Enter Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a title that promises to give us all the dungeons we crave without the pesky interference of mythological reptiles or wizards of legend. It never stopped it from being a great title – and it occasionally recaptured that magical immersion from the first few hours – but its issues are so severe that they effectively ruined my enjoyment of what is an otherwise very good game.First person action RPGs are nothing new, but they usually involve magic spells, made-up continents and world threatening crises. I was completely enthralled by the first three hours of the game, but the more I explored its systems, the more grating they became. In the end, Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a very good and immersive title, but it suffers from technical issues and some surprisingly misguided design decisions.
Kingdom come deliverance review Pc#
You would expect a proper PC control scheme to be tested for what’s arguably the platform of choice for RPG’s, perhaps with even a intuitive click and drag sword strike patched in, but that’s unfortunately not the case. Similarly, there is also no auto-walk function or sprint toggle, and galloping involves a very weird double press then hold of the Shift button, which is annoying and quickly becomes physically painful. Blocking in combat default binds to Q, leaving you unable to strafe if your defenses are up, while attacking involves a confusing angle system that may make complete sense with a fixed spring-built thumbstick, but has no meaning on a mouse relatively positioned on top of a gamepad. Virtually every menu and interaction, from melee combat angles to lockpick and pickpocketing minigames are made for a controller’s thumbsticks, to the point that some of them are literally unplayable due to horrible design.Īside from betraying a surprisingly lack of care towards the PC, this control scheme even affects your performance in fights. Weirdly, Kingdom Come’s controls were clearly designed with consoles in mind, and the PC suffers at the short end of the proverbial stick. Performance, thankfully, was quite good, with the CryEngine delivering powerful visuals that have been clearly optimised during development. After several hours with the game, I stopped approaching random NPC’s to talk because I was tired of waiting several seconds to see if they had a dialogue choice worth my time (they often didn’t).
Kingdom come deliverance review full#
Unlike the masterfully executed cutscenes, talking to someone is a stilted and artificial process, which always involves a cut to black transition and quite often a full loading screen. That is not the only design and technical aspect of the game that is under-delivered, as the dialogue system in the game is surprisingly non-fluid.
It is quite common for NPC’s to jerk between stances or have their items disappear in thin air, which immediately breaks the immersion the game works so hard to achieve. During my playthrough of Kingdom Come, I’ve got stuck on walls, had characters teleport, and animations bug out in immersion-shattering ways.
While its production values are through the roof, the game does suffer from quite a sizeable number of unpolished features and bugs. That is not a problem per se, but frankly, it is the sort of blatant oversight that should be immediately apparent when making a game that markets itself and purports to be about choices. Naturally, I talked to the executioner about it, and after passing a speech check, he says that yes, he had the ring, and asked me if I wanted it – at which point my character automatically blurted out “No, I don’t need it.” Taken aback, I went back to the quest giver miles away, and he promptly told me to go talk to the executioner about the ring (which now had a dialogue option amounting to “Yes, I want the ring”). Upon digging it out, you realise the executioner might have gotten it and the game orders you to return to the quest giver. A few hours into the game, you are given a mission to get a ring from a corpse.