Kingdom Come Deliverance - Review After 100%

all right what's going on everybody mortum here this time bringing you my review after 100 for Kingdom Come Deliverance the medieval simulator that takes place in 1403 from War Horse Studios after a successful Kickstarter campaign with the game originally launching back in 2018 and while it's obviously taken me a while to get around to playing it I cover a lot of games like this so it was pretty heavily requested that I eventually get around to it plus I had a lot of personal interest in playing through it to get my usual stuff out of the way I review games after 100 all the time mainly to set me apart from other reviewers on YouTube and if you're curious about everything that entails and you go to my page the first thing you'll see if you're not subscribed is a video explaining everything that I cover in these reviews and while that does include the achievements it is a lot more than that as well and as a random aside I might be updating that video soon as it's getting kind of on the old side and I'd like to give it a bit of a refresh though content Wise It's still all up to date now to kick this off with an overview can Kingdom Come Deliverance is an interesting title it is an open world first person RPG that takes place in 1403 in medieval Bohemia and while much of the story and the characters themselves are greatly embellished a lot of them are based on real historical things that we know about that time and to this end the game actually includes a codex which will explain just a lot of stuff about the time period but also very specifically about who people actually were that they're talking about in game which was a nice touch so if you're curious much of this game is based on things that are thought to have happened but obviously embellished quite a bit for a video game which is just the first of many things that this title does to bring quite a bit of immersion to the table so if you have to know anything about Kingdom Come Deliverance let it be that the game really focuses on immersion and while you can certainly break that later in the game even more so in normal as opposed to the hardcore mode but the game very much so follows a progression to power not unlike that of develop upper piranha bites who sees you starting off with a very weak character and then growing into a bit of an overpowered one and while in Kingdom Come Deliverance you can have a pretty frustrating time at the beginning towards the end the game does get pretty easy especially if you're going out of your way to level things up Etc but now that we've got the general gist of it out of the way let's talk about the story so as I mentioned much of the story revolves around sort of historical political machinations that we are aware of via documents that survived while also adding in some personal motivations for our character Henry that we play as we start the game in our village as a blacksmith Sun just kind of dealing with day-to-day life and shortly thereafter the village is attacked and ransacked with you being one of very few people who survive and this event sets you on the path to Vengeance against the person you see perpetrating all of this violence against the village which ultimately puts you on the path to Knighthood now while I don't want to spoil too much of the story of course what I do want to mention is that the beginning beginning of the game is really strong the game has a fantastic opener even if it is a little on the Cinematic heavy side and I would say up until about roughly halfway through the game that keeps up you're going to be pretty invested in the story and it takes some interesting turns however from about mid to late game the story really starts to fall off and then it culminates in an ending that is okay if anything they kind of clearly set up a sequel and a lot of the plot threads don't really get resolved which in my opinion gave a kind of unsatisfying ending at least as far as the story is concerned and while the later parts of the story do have some cool moments The Narrative itself and the plot of what is happening just gets really uninteresting after about halfway through which was really a bit of a letdown from there though let's talk about difficulty basically what you're choosing here is between normal or hardcore honestly you'll probably have a pretty challenging time either way but there's some important things to know about each for starters normal is a weird experience honestly this is one of the more interesting times where I think the harder difficulty is probably the better overall experience even though normal is going to be what most people choose and this is because Kingdom Come Deliverance is a game that kind of really focuses on immersion but on normal mode you're actually dealing with a lot of mechanics that try to improve your quality of life so to speak you can fast travel you can see all of these UI elements that really kind of help you out and figure out what to do you have a map you can actually use that kind of stuff so it's this weird mix of a mode where the game kind of wants you to be immersed but at the same time you have all of these features that kind of pull you out of that immersion but then there's hardcore mode which while certainly more challenging makes a lot more sense in terms of the way the mechanics are presented so for starters you don't get Auto saves in hardcore mode you can only save the game by forcing a manual Save which is already kind of weird in this game and we'll talk about that a little bit later but basically in hardcore mode you have to do something in game that forces a manual save as opposed to dealing with auto saves you also have a map but you don't get to see where you are on it so you have to kind of learn to navigate by what is around you and what you know of the map which is made even more interesting by the fact that there is no fast travel you can also not use the compass to get your bearings things only show up on the compass if you are very close to it the health and stamina UI is completely removed there are balances to the economy to make it more difficult as well and combat is overall more deadly and while that might sound really challenging at first if you've played through the game at least once you kind of already know what to expect and a lot of the UI and things like that are actually supplemented by visually what is happening on screen so for instance if I'm running out of stamina the entire screen is going to start to turn this sort of bluish shade and I don't need a UI to tell me when I'm low on stamina as a result and the removal of the combat UI really only affects the combo system which we'll talk a bit more about later but also not very impactful so while those are significant changes and I don't imagine a lot of people will jump into hardcore mode anyway I do think it's the better total experience from there though I want to talk about progression a little bit and we're going to talk about a wide variety of things but I want to preface this by saying that one of Kingdom Come deliverance's larger problems is how it conveys its ideas to you the player and what I mean by that is how the game tells you a system works and shows it to you tends to not actually be how that system works for instance during the prologue you're given a sort of Combat tutorial which as you might imagine would make you think oh this is the Combat tutorial but that's not true the actual Combat tutorial that is going to Grant you perks for completing that you need is actually further along into the main story and until you learn those perks and kind of learn how to perfectly block attacks which Honestly by itself makes the game much easier you're probably going to get destroyed in combat and I don't think that's the player's fault I think that's the game's fault for giving you two separate combat tutorials one of them being pretty pointless and you can see that kind of thing throughout the game but I do think that that's probably the most substantial one to mention so when we talk about progression that's certainly something to keep in mind but how it actually works is a level by doing system which is broken down into attributes combat and skills as you take part in combat or various activities that relate to the attributes or specific skills you will level those things up all of them have a level range of 1 to 20 and at certain points you will get various perks which can alter things and make your life easier which will help you mitigate things like hunger or just make combat much easier first up though let's talk about the attributes there are four of them that you can directly level up and there are others that are secondary that is to say they're almost derived stats from both your attributes themselves as well as other factors such as the things you are wearing but the ones you actually level up are strength agility vitality and speech your attributes will of course affect a lot of things for the most part this is self-explanatory but strength and Agility are mostly for com combat using various types of weapons Vitality is of course your sort of overall well-being and then speech is your ability to persuade others of course and all of these are important and you're likely to Max them out just playing through the game and doing the content but like most other things in this game as tends to be the case with open world RPGs in general you can sort of spam these progression systems very early to get yourself maxed out very quickly which can help you overcome a lot of the early game challenge but then we have our combat skills these are more or less what you'd expect there is Warfare defense and then various weapon skills weapon skills are pretty straightforward this is just whatever weapon you're using and we'll talk more about them individually in the combat section but as you level these up you'll get perks that unlock different sorts of combos for you to use outside of unarmed and the bow which just give you increased damage defense and warfare are a little more important as they dictate your sort of overall combat efficiency down to the chance of an enemy actually blocking or attacks the damage your weapons take to their durability that kind of thing as you participate in combat so while it's important to level up the weapon you are actually using the most defense and warfare are really the ones you want to keep an eye on here and these are going to go up simply by engaging in more and more combat and you can take advantage of some of the non-deadly dual options in the game to sort of level these up relatively risk-free which I think is important to note given the game's frustrating save system which we will get to but then we have skills there are a lot of skills in this game and each of them is a small system unto themselves so we have Alchemy stealth reading drinking herbalism horsemanship hounds master lock picking maintenance pickpocketing and hunting each one of these particular skills is sort of its own little system for instance Alchemy has this entire Mini-Game attached to it where you actually have to brew the potion that you are making which will then have various in-game effects and Alchemy in particular though honestly most of these skills outside of a few can lead to you becoming very overpowered if you put in the work to Max them out Alchemy in particular is especially useful though because this will allow you to brew save your schnapps yourself which is an item that you need to drink to manually save the game which again we'll talk more about in the gameplay section then you have stealth though stealth is your next best option if you don't want to engage in direct combat because there is a sort of pacifist route available to you there's only one person throughout the game you are required to kill and beyond that you can pretty much avoid combat if you really want to and stealth is kind of your option there and once you get it leveled up to a certain point you can start making stealth kills which means if you're not particularly good at one-on-one combat and you get tasks to take out a bandit Camp you can say wait until Nightfall and then go butcher their camp in their sleep using the stealth skill then there's the reading skill this is a medieval period where people don't know how to read your character does not know how to read at the start of the game and you have to go complete a side quest if you'd like to learn how and the more things you read you starting increasing your reading skill which lets you read things faster which will give you access to various skill books which makes it that much easier to level things up then of course there is drinking which will help you in the drinking mini game I would tell you this one didn't come up a ton by any means but then you have herbalism herbalism kind of goes hand in hand with Alchemy this just lets you gather herbs yourself very quickly and it's advised you take herbalism pretty quickly because there's a perk you can get kind of halfway through that allows you to also provide strength experience just from picking up plants which will allow you to train herbalism and your strength at the same time while also Gathering reagents to brew the potions that are going to make you super strong that can be a really effective way to grind in the early game then there's horsemanship you'll eventually get access to a horse and the more you ride it around the higher this skill goes and leveling this up will basically keep you from getting thrown off your horse if the horse gets scared or runs into something that kind of thing maintenance will allow you to repair your own armor there is durability damage with the equipment system here and you can either have have a vendor repair it for you or if you have the skill level and the kits required to do so you can repair your own weapons and armor kind of reminded me of Oblivion system here and maintenance will give you some perks for repairing your own armor which will increase some of your stats temporarily then there's hunting this just makes you better at hunting which will then let you sell the various meet and things to vendors for some cheap cash then we have an interesting one with the pickpocket system so I found pickpocket to be mostly useless in this game like a lot of the other skills there's a mini game associated with it where you have to actually reach into someone's pocket unveil the thing that you want to find and then get it out of the pocket via a mini game but rather than deal with this mini game what I found effective is that the game considers you knocking someone out and just taking something to also be pickpocketing so in a somewhat hilarious manner if you're having trouble pickpocketing someone what you can do instead is just knock them out and take the quest item that you're trying to get anyway which also counts as pickpocketing so if you can get that per personal loan just knock them out in many cases you won't even get a bounty which completely sidesteps this mini game and is honestly a lot funnier then we have lock picking lock picking in this game is a little bit challenging because the mini game is probably a little bit different than most people are used to you have to point your cursor at a certain point in the lock and then rotate the lock while maintaining your cursor on that point which on a keyboard and mouse is not bad at all but I did play this on Steam deck which we'll talk about and using a controller for this mini game is a real nightmare but on PC once you get the hang of it it's really not that bad and of course as you level it up and take perks it gets much easier and last but not least we have hounds master I believe this was added by a DLC specifically one called A Woman's lot but this DLC gives you access to a dog companion and as you engage with that dog and level it up you get the hounds Master skill which lets you use that dog in combat which can honestly be really helpful but from there let's talk a little bit about the progression systems as a whole so as I've already mentioned the progression systems have a problem with conveyance oftentimes how something is presented to you really isn't how it works or you have to level it up a little bit to get to a point where it's actually useful in the main way you would expect it to be now on one hand I think this comes down to a little bit of immersion Henry is supposed to be sort of useless when you start the game I just don't think the game does a good job of conveying that all the time but a good way to think about it is that levels one through five of a skill you're almost taking a penalty to actually using it and then at five plus you actually start to be decent at it and then start getting real bonuses to it but before that Henry's so bad at it that you might as well be taking a penalty in some way and in one case literally if you're using a bow before you have level five skill in it if you're not wearing van braces you'll actually damage yourself which is meant to simulate the bow string doing damage to your forearm because you don't know what you're doing and because of that conveyance problem as well as sort of these hidden detriments that you kind of need to overcome the initial experience can be a little off-putting but once you get past that sort of Hill it kind of goes the exact opposite direction you get so ridiculously good at everything the game becomes very very easy I think this is especially true of stealth because while one-on-one combat or just fighting in general is a relatively difficult task and we'll talk about that next if you have something like stealth and you go in at night time you can just very quickly kill almost everyone without being seen with the risk being that you need to wear light less noisy clothing which means if you get seen you're likely going to get torn to shreds because you don't have any armor on and that brings us to the combat section of this video combat is mostly broken down into melee ranged stealth and I guess maybe a little bit of poison if you want to consider that stealth but you can also use it in melee if you just poison your weapons now ranged and stealth are very straightforward I think everyone knows how stealth works it's pretty much the same here as it is in other games you crouch you sneak around you have to get level five before you can make stealth kills and that's pretty much it only other thing to keep in mind there is to keep an eye on your noise factor which is basically just don't wear metal armor and general visibility as it is much easier to sneak at night in dark clothing than it is during the day in bright clothing then we have ranged if you don't want to do stealth ranged as a great alternative as well because a lot of enemies don't really have a good block for a well-aimed arrow and while it can be a little bit awkward at first especially because you don't have a sort of marker to see where your arrow is actually going and there's a lot of sway to it like all of the other skills once you get good at it and you can kind of figure out where you're actually placing your arrows this can be devastating because while enemies will use arrows they can't really jump which means if you get up to a high place and start raining arrows down on your enemies you are at a significant Advantage because the AI doesn't really have a tactic to deal with that and then once they finally get to you which will be a slow experience if you're actually up above them you can then switch to melee combat having to deal with less enemies if any at all but then we have the melee combat which this game is a little bit more known for and where things are a little bit more complicated so you might be forgiven for thinking that this is a skill based system by the looks of the combat but it's honestly not this is actually a stat based system that is very cleverly hidden as a skill based system which again I think is down to a conveyance issue the game does a lot of work in the tutorial to kind of tell you that oh the direction of your attacks matter the direction of your blocks matter that kind of thing and a lot of that just isn't true so in normal mode you'll actually see the UI here where it kind of shows the direction that you're attacking from the only thing that matters for is pulling off your combos because that requires you to make certain attacks in a certain order from certain directions pretty much everything else is down to your stats Warfare and the weapon you're actually using which will determine things like your damage as well as the chance of the enemy blocking you or doing a counter attack Etc and in addition to that just kind of basic information though there's also the actual damage and resistance types there are three damage types and thus three armor types against those damage types which are slashing piercing and blunt and it's because of these stats that I honestly think the mace is probably the best way to go in terms of melee combat because for starters you can use it with a shield which is going to help you out because trying to use a traditional sword with a shield doesn't really work because you can't do the combos anymore whereas you can use something like a mace with a shield and it's not a big deal most importantly As you move towards the late game a lot of enemies are wearing plate and heavy armor which reduces their damage completely until you burn through their stamina but the mace deals blunt damage which is still able to deal effective damage to these guys a sword really only feels effective in the beginning when you're fighting lightly armored characters and it really felt like I just couldn't get anything done with the sword late game at least not nearly as easily as I could with just a mace but as for the rest of combat the main thing to know is just train up your skills as quickly as as you can because the combat is more stat based than the game would like to present it as and once you figure that out it's not very difficult to just train your stats up and stop trying to approach it as a skill based system and the other thing that I mentioned earlier it's important to get through the game to the point of the sort of second Combat tutorial as quickly as you can because completing that tutorial gives you access to certain perks just for completing it that's going to make melee combat much easier this is the ability to perfect block as well as counter attack once you reach level 5 of a given weapon which brings me to my last point for combat and that is simply that there's a huge progression of power here what can feel very difficult in the beginning fighting just like one person becomes kind of trivial after a point to where you can kind of just walk into a camp by yourself and decimate it even without going the stealth route especially if you start adding potions on top of your just actual stats though this will usually require you to be playing plate mail which is going to negate pretty much all of the damage provided did you actually make an effort to block enemy attacks and conserve your stamina that though brings us to the gameplay and World building section so first and foremost in terms of the gameplay there's one big thing I want to mention that I've referred to a couple times and that is the save system the save system is incredibly awkward for this game and that is why one of the biggest mods for this game is a mod that just lets you save whenever you want because as it stands with the base game there is no way to manually save the game just from the menu you have to actually take an action in game to do that which if you want to save anywhere requires you to drink a drink known as Xavier schnapps which can also get you drunk which you may or may not want to do in any given situation on top of this there is limited save slots available to you and if you don't have any of that drink what you have to do instead is go rest somewhere or completely exit the game to make an exit save now I'm fully aware some people will tell me that this save system is like that because they wanted to enhance the immersion and that is great for hardcore mode on normal mode where people are playing a giant open world RPG where they just want to see things and try things there should be a manual save system that isn't this clunky and that's why the biggest mod for it is that save system because when you have a save system like this in the regular version of the game where people didn't sign up for that the choice you are encouraging them to make is to not play your game but again there is a mod that will fix this for you it's just very annoying and that's before I even start talking about things like bugs and the occasional crash there's a handful of quests that are still bugged and if you would like to sort of work your way through them on your own a save system that isn't annoying would be nice combine that with the occasional crash this game will have which in one particularly egregious case cost me like an hour of gameplay because of the save system you're opening the door to frustration that just doesn't need to be there and in hardcore mode I think this system makes more sense especially with the dropped Auto saves but in normal it just feels off now in addition to that what I haven't really mentioned up to this point is all of these survival elements you do have to keep your character fed and occasionally sleep sleeping will save the game as well by the way but the big thing is nourishment if you go too long without either of these things your stats will start to take a hit if you don't eat for a certain period of time you will eventually just die and while this can be rough in the beginning you can eventually get access to perks that completely negate the impact of this for instance there is one perk that will remove the reduction over time so long as your character is standing still which means when you are doing things like sleeping reading Etc you actually won't lose energy or nourishment which are your sleep and food stance which just kind of completely nullifies most of that system's impact but there's also other smaller systems such as injuries if you get hit a lot and combat you're bound to take an injury which will reduce stats or your Effectiveness with various things depending on where you got injured this can lead to bleeding which you'll need to cure via a bandage so it's important to understand that while you're running around traveling and exploring that you're also kind of trying trying to survive the areas you're going to and the trips you're making which adds a very immersive element to the whole thing especially on hardcore mode but beyond that the game world is really cool and mostly feels realistic pretty much what you would expect at least so there's a variety of towns and everything that are pretty busy and full of life some of them have their own laws and everything for instance in one area in particular I would get fined if I walked around without a torch at night but then in other Villages nobody seemed to care there's a justice system for each one though with this being the Medieval Times there are very few ways for them to sort of track you down for your misdeeds if no one can really see the crime so various things like that there's a justice system that feels right for the time period and you can even get thrown in jail which will reduce your stats for a set period of time afterwards with the only real caveat being here that the game won't ever just like outright send you to death or anything you'll just have to spend some time in prison kind of no matter what you did but all of these Villages and pounds are again modeled after real places that exist in the world all of the characters and a lot of the named people you see are modeled after real people that existed and because of this the World building is fantastic it really does feel like a real place you are visiting which all combines into this game's strong point which is the immersion there's a ton of side quests to explore and see a lot of that stuff is really interesting and handles topics that would be relevant to this time period like say concepts about the occult that kind of stuff a lot of which lets you approach it however you want with a lot of these side quests having variable outcomes depending on what you do even in some cases you can just outright leave which will just in some cases fail the quest other times it will sort of change the outcome or lead to Unique dialogue there's a lot of interesting stuff going on and it makes the world feel very realistic at least but now let's talk a little bit about the major DLCs of which there are four for the most part these are okay and they just add little extra side Quest plots for you to undertake which is the case for the Amorous Adventures of Capone or something like that this lets you be a sort of wingman to another character in game then there's band of bastards this just sees you following a mercenary group trying to secure the roads in the wake of the attacks then there are the two more interesting ones for starters there is From the Ashes this will allow you to rebuild a town that is available about halfway through the story which is well worth your time as doing so will give you access to daily income as well as a ton of resources directly at a town that you can access for free which makes it sort of the best Hub in the game and then last but not least we have a woman's lot this is the biggest DLC by far and I'm kind of mixed on it for the most part I enjoy it this is the one that brought the hounds Master skill as well as two sort of side plots one is an alternative prologue you can play through which is kind of interesting it lets you see the attack on the starter Village from a somewhat different angle and it's interesting enough the other half of it though I've got gotta say I was not wild about at the end the second subplot you follow a woman who survived the attack on the early Village as well who has taken up Residence at a monastery this becomes available after you complete a few quests that are relevant to this and she starts seeing visions which ultimately come true and this prompts a big investigation into her for heresy and this is where I think the game kind of really drops the ball honestly as far as the DLC goes was the very end of this part of a woman's lot because whereas most of the game allows you to sort of approach things from different angles and there's a lot of options Etc the game kind of forces you down a very specific path if you want the good ending for this DLC because otherwise no matter what you do the woman dies there's multiple ways you can fail this just by asking a question in dialogue that will see you thrown in jail unless you missed the trial thus you fail if you didn't take certain actions throughout the DLC you fail if you don't have certain skill checks required to kind of deal with certain aspects of the trial you fail and it's just such a weird way to end the DLC because again everything else in this game is sort of open and lets you approach things and then all of a sudden for this Quest you kind of just get railroaded into an ending unless you do it in a very hyper-specific way and because of that it just kind of soured the whole experience for me which is a shame because the rest of that DLC isn't bad but that said moving on to the steam deck performance this game runs surprisingly well on Steam deck I was expecting a few more problems honestly but the game has controller support for starters which goes a long way for a game feeling good to play on that system but in addition to that the game just runs really well on the steam deck which surprised me because of the sort of open world nature of it and all the systems at play and while there are certainly comparable titles that play pretty well on there a lot of those are sort of more highly polished AAA experiences and ultimately Kingdom Come Deliverance surprised me on the steam deck it runs very well my only real complaint in this regard is that the UI definitely wasn't set up for a screen that small which can make reading some of the text a bit of a pain but there is that magnifying tool that the steam deck has if push come to shove but all in all on Steam deck surprisingly smooth experience the game's official rating is playable though discounting the small text issue there's really no reason this game shouldn't have a great on Deck rating but that finally brings us to our positives negatives and then we will ramp this thing up so on the positive side of things the immersion is great all of the ways you can approach everything it feels good to engage with the sort of power curve of taking Henry from this sort of almost useless peasant at the beginning to an almost unkillable night towards the end there are also some Siege battles I didn't really mention that are honestly pretty cool to see and the world feels appropriate well researched and just interesting to play through there's a lot of things about that time period that are interesting to see in action and playing through that was very very enjoyable now on the negative side of things I would say this game's biggest problem is the conveyance of its own ideas it is very bad at actually telling you how things work and in some cases how the game tells you something works just isn't correct or at least it's not how you're likely to be engaging with that system past the very beginning of it you combine that with other clunky systems like the save system there's the combat system itself which just simply isn't going to be for everyone I was able to find enjoyment in it eventually but I started off not liking it really at all but once I kind of figured out how it actually worked which was very contrary to what the tutorial of the game told me was how it worked I did eventually get to a point where I was having fun with it but ultimately there's just a lot of little clunky systems like that throughout the game which can dampen the experience as a whole which brings me to my conclusion Kingdom Come Deliverance is overall an incredibly immersive game that has a lot of fantastic ideas it's certainly unique in the sense that you don't exactly see a lot lot of medieval simulators and it's a game whose systems tend to be dealt with in extremes they're either really good at what they do or they're clunky and really annoying but the same could be said of a great mini games I've played on this channel and in that regard Kingdom Come Deliverance isn't that unique but to look at the entire game as a whole I think it was a great first outing for War Horse Studios that stumbled in a few places that I'd like to see smoothed out in whatever they work on next rumor is it's a sequel to this game that is currently in development but nothing official has been said but overall I think if they take that Sequel and smooth out some of the pain points then they could have an incredible game on their hands because as it stands Kingdom Come Deliverance is very good but it also has a lot of potential for frustration and the combat system just by itself is probably going to be pretty make or break for most people but overall the game definitely gets a buy from me especially when you consider the price of the thing right now full price for the game is about 30 dollars but it regularly goes goes on sale I personally bought the Royal Edition on the winter sale which is the game and all its DLCs for about twelve dollars so if you can find it on sale all the better but even at full price there's a lot of game here to enjoy and I definitely think it's worth taking a look at if you have the time especially since I spent well over a hundred hours enjoying what this game had to offer that is all I've got for you guys I certainly hope you enjoyed the video if you did like comment subscribe all that YouTube jazz we are growing every day and I love talking about various video games with you all so truly thank you so much for watching I really do appreciate it may you wander in wisdom and have an amazing day foreign

Channel: Mortismal Gaming

Views: 454,587

Keywords: Mortym, Mortismal Gaming, kingdome come, kingdome come deliverance, kingdome come deliverance review, kingdom come deliverance gameplay, kingdom come deliverance walkthrough, kingdome come deliverance combat, kingdom come deliverance lockpicking, kingdom come deliverance tips, kingdom come deliverance guide

Id: BnE6lJourBU

Length: 31min 52sec (1912 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 15 2023