With Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Czech developer Warhorse Studios demands a seat at the table of role playing masters with a dangerously immersive WRPG that, almost disappointingly, is polished to mirror-brightness, like a dazzling suit of tourney plate.
Armed with a bizarre mixture of mechanics seemingly inspired by Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption 2, and The Witcher 3, and armoured in the eccentricities of Warhorse’s own deeply emergent, painstakingly historical world, the developer’s relentlessly hardcore medieval knight simulator is one of the most immersive, all-consuming experiences we’ve faced down in years.
The direct sequel to 2018’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance, it’s clear Warhorse has been gathering itself for this charge, and the sequel throws down a defiant RPG gauntlet that very few studios (CD Projekt Red, Larian) could ever hope to follow, let alone accede.
Continuing the relatively low-stakes tale of Henry of Skalitz, set in the Kingdom of Bohemia (modern Czech Republic) in 1403 during the high Middle Ages, our unlikely hero is now squire to the ludicrous (but undeniably lovable) Hans Capon, the flamboyant young Lord of Pirkstein. The two are swept up in the violent, endless, Machiavellian political machinations of the Holy Roman Empire (which, in one of history’s great ironies, is neither holy, Roman, nor an empire).
Daring to do the seemingly suicidal, Warhorse offers players a Skyrim-like experience but completely mundane. The developer contrives a way (following a string of scene-setting cinematics) to make players feel truly alone, penniless, and underpowered all over again. There are no difficulty settings here; before you get a faithful hound beside you, a noble steed beneath you, and a stable roof over your head, life is hard, eked out by the hour, and you must spend every waking moment moving forward.
Warhorse has valiantly attempted to file away some of the original’s rough edges and largely succeeds; there is just no getting around how much the game demands of the player, however, assaulting them with endless mechanics, ticking survival meters, and dozens upon dozens of pages of lovingly illustrated tutorials. We predict many players will bounce off the game entirely, cursing reviews like this one; uncompromising and singular in vision, Warhorse asks a lot, demanding your most valuable and limited resource: attention.
Saving happens when you exit the game, during specific story moments, when sleeping in an owned/rented bed, or upon drinking delicious Saviour Schnapps, giving the monstrous RPG the air of something like XCOM’s Ironman Mode. You can load a previous save, but new ones will be made regardless, spurring you forward. None of the above is optional, and that’s just for starters (we shudder to imagine what the post-launch Hardcore mode will entail).
Combat is a central tenant, as Henry is a bastard-born noble now retainer to Capon, technically making him a knight in the day’s structure. Realistically, even a fair fight, at first, is an incredibly overwhelming affair and likely to result in serious injury or death. The intense nature of the first-person perspective makes any encounter difficult early on, which encourages unchivalrous behaviour.
Still, once you get some decent gear (and seek out a swordsman named Tomcat, who will explain basic, essential mechanics), combat is incredibly compelling and far more profound than it first appears. Directional blocking, along with counters, ripostes, grapples, master strikes, and honest-to-goodness combos, must be unlocked from masters in the world across a meaningful variety of brutal weaponry.
We lived under a hedge for days at first, stealing sleep and food where possible; a stinky, foreign knave claiming to be a knight and, therefore, to be treated with hostile suspicion at best. It was one of the most engrossing and immersive video game experiences we’ve had in recent memory. The reactive world means peasants, burghers, bandits, and nobles alike just wander about, living lives completely independently of Henry.
NPCs maintain a strict, relentlessly consistent social code of conduct, and you are expected to play by the rules (which, in turn, are made to be broken). You can interact with most people in surprising ways, similar in effect to Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2. The absurdly granular, regional, and even social-class-specific reputation system will hold you accountable and simultaneously allow the word of your deeds, good and bad, to spread in a fascinating fashion. There isn’t space for it all, but shout out to the game’s seemingly simplistic stealth system, which has no business being as involved or rewarding as it is; likewise, considerable immersive sim energy pervades many main and side quests, which will frequently offer multiple methods of resolution, provided you can find, make, or brute-force them. Forget Eurojank; WRPGs of this size and quality are now almost exclusively made in Eastern Europe.
We spent around 20 hours in the game’s open world at this point, taking odd jobs, becoming familiar with endless mechanics, and immersing ourselves in the many varied, ludicrously involved (but deeply gratifying) crafting minigames before finally starting the game’s surprisingly reactive central quest line. In hindsight, you are encouraged to follow the story and will be richly rewarded for doing so, so we needn’t have struggled as much as we did. Still, it took us just that long to wrap our heads around most of the game’s basic mechanics.
Past the 40+ hour mark, our jaw hit the floor when, after a particularly climatic sequence and some meaningful plot development (that, in a lesser offering, might have served as some conclusion), we found ourselves adrift in a second, somehow larger, inexplicably even more detailed open world map. We still weren’t done with the first, and the revelation came as a welcome and generous-seeming surprise to us (being only halfway to the level cap of 30 should have tipped us off).
It seems silly now; the Kuttenberg region hosts much of the game’s content (including the principal city of the same name). This is an enormous video game that is unbelievably generous in terms of meaningful, well-made, worthwhile content. It dwarfs the relative size of the analogously structured Fallout 4, for example, and is several orders of magnitude deeper, mechanically speaking. And it all starts with Henry.
Henry of Skalitz is, if fates be kind, destined to join the ranks of the all-time great open world video game protagonists alongside Arthur Morgan and Geralt of Rivia. Heroically voiced by Tom McKay in English and Richard Wágner in Czech, with over 500 hours logged in the VO booth, the cinematic and even incidental performances are fantastic, of the highest quality, and seemingly without end.
You spend a lot of time in Henry’s shoes, and he has a shocking amount to say. Whether bathing with buxom maidens, storming a castle wall, or drunkenly attempting to steal the neighbouring village’s beloved maypole on a dare, Henry is hilarious, tragic, reliable, and, best of all, a believable everyman in a vibrant time of gross inequality and misery. As a reasonably mundane protagonist, he’s simply incredible; contrary to popular belief, day-to-day medieval life wasn’t nearly as bleak as you might think, and the rowdy Bohemian people are an exceptionally resilient and fun-loving bunch.
As with the Yakuza / Like a Dragon, or even the Persona series, at least in our opinion, playing a game so culturally rich, so of a specific time and place, in English, almost feels a shame. This is made more difficult by an excellent English performance, which truly puts in some standout localisation work: doing a lot to differentiate between the various ethnic groups like Czechs, Cumans, Jews, Poles, and the endless variations of Germans, that uneasily co-exist in the region (“Henry” is far and away the most modern, Western-sounding name in the game; Germans will insist on the more proper “Heinrich”).
Henry will be called upon to deal with outrageous situations in the grand tradition of open world adventure, and the games boasts many side quests of the first order. Demons, ghosts, dragons, magical objects like the powerful Thunderstone or the mysterious bezoar, artefacts said to have had contact with Jesus Christ himself; from medical emergencies, bandit issues or matters of the heart or soul, nothing is outside of Henry’s purview, and he’s willing to have a go at anything or anyone. Using the historically accurate ignorance of the time, these matters are almost always taken extremely seriously, allowing for some truly ridiculous moments of levity in an otherwise profoundly political, serious game.
