Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 feels like a hobgoblin game. A game for late nights, sick days off work. A game you can obsess over. It’s a wonderful historical romp for the average video game-enjoyer, if they have the constitution to munch on the occasional wave of tedium. Allow me to make a case for the game’s merit by comparing it to the inevitable rival it’ll have in the eyes of gamers: The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim for good measure.
Does it have the same skill-leveling mechanic as the first one, where (when holding a weapon) the player has about as much control of their body as a drunk standing on one stilt, and sometimes has to fight with actions failing to work at all, until they slog through hours of mind-numbing training sessions?
I wanted to like KC:D. There were parts of it that I found really appealing, but I found that mechanic bloody intolerable, so I ended up deleting it and never looking back.
Edit to clarify:
I like games where the challenge comes from learning how to work with available tools and moves, developing my skill with them, and figuring out how to use them most effectively. Making progress that way is satisfying.
Interfering with my ability to control my character is the polar opposite of that. It has nothing to do with developing my skill, but instead just arbitrarily denies me agency. The first game does this heavily until various grind chores are endured for some period of time. No thanks. I think it’s a poor substitute for refined or nuanced combat mechanics, and I don’t find it fun.
Props to the folks who managed to have a good time with it, though. I really liked other parts of the game.
The combat for me was refreshing honestly, it felt like actual skills and knowledge I have irl about swordfighting (which are bad against better fighters and limited knowledge tbh) translated really well. Once you figure out the controls it’s pretty easy and just about managing your stamina a bit.
Other parts like the monastery mission just felt bugged and we’re frustrating to the point it basically stopped me from finishing the game. I even looked up a walkthrough and that did nothing. A shame though because I really liked wondering around in the world but that mission basically stopped me from just doing that too.
The monastery was great, you could cheese it in so many ways
My main issue with the first game was that I felt like it didn’t respect my time. There were some missions where the game would send you miles away to get something or find a person, only for you to arrive there and have an NPC go “Nah it’s not here” and send you miles in the other direction and do the same thing, and sometimes arbitrarily dump like 6 bandits on you along the way that you had no hope of defeating, so you’d die and go all the way back to square one again. I had to bail on eventually because of that.
Just do archery. Maybe a dagger for backup. I was playing a shitload of Mordhau back then, and that only underscored Deliverance’s melee clunkiness even further. Still a fun game, though.