Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 review: Violent vocation

The original Kingdom Come: Deliverance was a great game that was easy to overlook. Maybe 15th century Bohemia doesn’t grab your attention in the same way that a more traditional fantasy adventure might, maybe you heard about the technical issues the game had at launch or the creative director’s history of controversial posts on social media and open support for online harassment campaigns.

Still, if you could get past all that though, the game was a gem of an open world RPG that rewarded you generously for the time you put into it. If you’re at all intrigued by what the sequel has to offer, you’re honestly better off tracking down a cheap copy of the first game if you haven’t played it instead. 

While Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a bigger, better and bolder version of what that game had to offer, it’s not a terribly different one. Even if Warhorses' sequel comes with a lot of key quality of live improvements, it remains as both punishing and peculiar and whether that its sink-or-swim approach to difficulty will work for you rather than against your enjoyment of the game can be something of a coin flip.

If you don't love this game, you'll probably hate it. Fortunately, I'm in the former camp and six years after the first game left me wanting more, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 fully satisfied my appetite for the epic “dungeons & no dragons” experience that Warhorse originally promised 15 years ago. 

Looking back, it’s genuinely really hard to untangle my opinion of the first Kingdom Come from the experience I had reviewing it. On one hand, Warhorse's historically-inspired open-world RPG launched in such a buggy state that my save managed to get corrupted after about twenty hours of play and I had to start the whole thing over. On the other, I liked Kingdom Come: Deliverance enough to go through the whole thing through a second time just to see how its story wrapped up.

Even so, it was hard to shake the sense of compromise that conclusion left me with. For as much as I adored its grounded setting and the cast of characters it introduced, Kingdom Come: Deliverance seemed to run out of runway right when its story began to take flight. By comparison, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 feels like it makes good on six years of waiting.

If – like me – you felt that the first game felt like it under-delivered then the opposite is very much the case for Warhorse’s second foray into medieval Bohemia.

Where the first Kingdom Come: Deliverance saw Henry of Skalitz finding a new place for himself in the area surrounding his hometown, the second sees him embark on a diplomatic mission that takes him into other parts of Bohemia and eventually the city of Kuttenberg and its surrounds.

Rather than merely tease at the adventures to come, the main quest in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a sprawling but steady epic that swings above its weight-class. Like the first game, that story can be a bit of a slow-burn. However, unlike its predecessor, it does eventually pay off on the many characters and subplots it goes to all the trouble of setting up.

What’s here very much feels like the second and third acts of the same story introduced in the first game. At times, it genuinely feels like Warhorse squeezed two games worth of stuff into Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Instead of giving you a single fresh slice of old Europe to explore, it gives you two massive new regions to traverse. In terms of size and scope, it would not be out of pocket to compare this game with the likes of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Elden Ring or The Elder Scrolls.

As with the first game though, you’re free to follow through on Henry’s quest for vengeance at your own pace. After a fairly on-the-rails opening quest that teaches you some of the basics, you’re set loose and free to make your own way in Warhorses’ sprawling and splendorous vision of the past. 

Again echoing its predecessor, the open world in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is full of distractions that go beyond the rote side quests or bandit camps. You can get into blacksmithing, alchemy, poaching, cooking and even grave-digging. The more time you sink into any specific facet of the experience, the better Henry will get at that specific thing and the more perks you’ll unlock for your version of the character. 

What’s more, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is much quicker to cut the fat and get you to the magic much sooner. You level up much faster and the perks that each skill tree in the game offers are frequently much more significant and impactful on the way you play.

Every pathway the game presents is an opportunity to level up your skills and make a few bucks. If you’re ever short on cash, going full robber baron is always an option. However, the reputation and justice system in the game may eventually catch up with you if you’re reckless about it. Still, Warhorse never does anything by halves and where other open world games might have a single lock-picking system for wannabe lowlifes, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 incorporates no less than three different skill-based minigames to keep you occupied.

Regardless of whether you’re sticking to the straight and narrow or getting your hands dirty, it never feels like you’re wasting time in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 so much as you are spending it falling deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. And to be sure, it's easy enough to get caught up on that details that define the extraordinarily detailed world that Warhorse have created here.

Even if the Warhorse's sequel is much working with the same palette as its predecessor and just as subject to the odd graphical glitch, the final level of fidelity it delivers is significantly greater. It looks like my memory of the first game does, with the details filled in and the shortcuts more cleverly hidden. 

A big part of the marketing campaign for both this game and its predecessor evokes the idea of historical accuracy. Predictably, this claim has opened the door to all sort of the debates. History is a contested space and any efforts to represent the past are inherently political and invite tricky questions with no clear answer to them.

Nevertheless, I think the focus on that aspect of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 by both Warhorse and the series' legion of online fans (and detractors) really misses the mark. The thing that is compelling about both this game (and its predecessor) is not that it claims to fully represent the past as it happened or as one specific creative director believes it happened. The secret sauce in Kingdom Come: Deliverance and its sequel is not realism but reactivity. The sense that you live in a complicated world that pushes back against you as often as it gives way.

The dynamism is the ingredient that'll pull you through the fifty-plus hours that Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 might take you to complete. This isn't just a game where a city guard spots you doing something and yells ("STOP THERE, CITIZEN!") at you. It's one where, at that point, you have multiple pathways to both raise the stakes or de-escalate the situation.

It's not all life-and-death though. If anything, the more mundane elements of life simulation are a big part of what sets Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 apart from open world RPGs like it. It’s easy to imagine a version of this experience that opts towards abstraction instead but that version of the game would feel like everything else where this feels like the kind of game that just doesn’t get made anymore. 

In both big ways and small, the willingness to introduce friction and punish the player for misbehavior when necessary is a big part of what gives Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 its specific and unique flavor. The fact that you don’t have to just remember to sleep and eat in this game but also do laundry and bathe regularly adds so much to the sense of immersion you get from inhabiting the setting it presents.

Where Diablo lets you walk up and click on a shrine to get a buff, Warhorse expects you to sit through your character spending a few real-world minutes muttering their way through a prayer or two for the same reward.

Just as much thoughtfulness has gone into the combat and conversation systems in the game as anything else and even if there are times where violence is unavoidable, having a silver tongue can often yeild unexpected dividends. That’s not to say you can talk your way out of every bad situation though.

Like the first game, the combat in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is brutal but rewarding. One-on-one duels are often less determined by the quality of your gear than they are your ability to pay attention to and take advantage of your opponent’s stance. Meanwhile, the bigger brawls in the game offer a level of spectacle that the first game couldn’t deliver on and the opportunity to let loose with greater diversity of weapons introduced by its sequel. 

As much as any other aspect of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 though, what’s here isn’t terribly different from what was in the first game. Still, it’s a lot cleaner to parse. There are also a ton of quality of life improvements, from a shortcut that lets you pull out a torch quicker to the redesigned UI to being able to automatically follow important NPCs during some of the game’s more conversation-heavy story missions. 

Relative to the first game in the series, it feels like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has just as much of the good friction and a lot less of its undesirable counterpart.

Even if I’d still err on the side of starting your time in Bohemia with the first game, those improvements do add up to something that’s a lot easier to recommend to those who want to jump straight into the second. All told, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is a more ambitious and self-assured sequel that streamlines things for the better without losing what that gave the first game its charm.

Once it launches, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 will be available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.