Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 review: A filthy brute of an RPG

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a filthy game. It’s a game that will make you thank God that you were born in the age of contactless payment and Nespresso coffee pots, rather than a world where you’d have a bowl of sick for your breakfast, rotten meat for lunch, and be decapitated for dinner.

In what feels like a direct response to medieval fantasy stories where everyone looks like a supermodel and all the grime has been Cilit Banged, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is utterly grimy. Every single character in the game looks like they stink.

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That commitment to tone, to bleak peasant living, to a life expectancy of about 20 is the setting for one of the most accomplished RPGs in years and a forthright statement of intent from Warhorse Studios. With Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 it doesn’t just earn a seat at the top table, it kicks it down, swigs a pint of wine, then starts a fistfight in a ditch.

Picking up from the end of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Henry and Hans are off on a mission to deliver a message. What can go wrong? Well, absolutely everything, it turns out. Soon, they’re separated, and Henry is back to square one, working his way up to the landed gentry once again, digging through the pig slop.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is unforgiving. You need to eat, sleep, drink, make sure you don’t get food poisoning, make sure you’re not filthy, and make sure you can swing a sword without getting slashed to pieces. In the same way, Henry has to relearn the ropes of being a pauper, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an ice bath when compared to the modern conveniences of contemporary RPGs.

Every little thing becomes a victory. Fresh food and a safe bed for the night feel like you’ve found a mountain of gold. The game’s even harder if you’re planning to play Henry as a good guy. I attempted this for the first few hours, no crime, no immoral acts. But then, after the 50th time, after someone had spit in my eye, my Henry turned heel. Thief, murderer, shagger-in-chief, Henry was at it.

The game’s RPG system has traditional levels, but those levels are also split into subcategories for your attributes. These categories also allow you to pick perks. For example, if you’re low on stamina, you get a health boost, or you take less damage from eating expired food.

For the first few hours, you’ll feel like you’re constantly launching into the slightly clunky menus to assign points and perks, but this is a very early game issue that evens out. Broadly, I felt the level system kept Henry just below feeling powerful for the majority of the game, before crescendoing towards the end, making for some nice pacing.

The game’s combat system returns from Kingdom Come: Deliverance, with five-way directional attacking and defending. This system has been refined and feels much less clunky than the original. When playing as a sword fighter, it does somewhat fall into the realm of just waiting for a parry symbol to appear, but this almost rhythm-game-like mechanic can add a significant layer of tension in tougher fights.

“For the first few hours, you’ll feel like you’re constantly launching into the slightly clunky menus to assign points and perks, but this is a very early game issue that evens out.”

There are also ranged weapons, which vary in effectiveness. While they’re powerful and, in most cases, a one-hit-kill in exposed areas, the time that it takes to reload them means you’ve probably been stabbed to ribbons before you get the chance for a second shot.

My main issue with the game, and one that will likely become a meme in the weeks following the release of the game, is the unfathomably difficult lockpicking minigame. This isn’t explicitly required at any point in the game, but if you were at all keen on sneaking around and pinching from chests, good luck. Even on the “easy” tier of locks, I was inches from snapping my controller in half.

On the one hand, it plays into the game’s desire to be challenging, and in the fiction of the world, Henry is no great lockpicker, but it’s the only mechanic in the game where that intentional toughness manifested as blood-boiling frustration.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a massive game. In fact, the way the game’s map and narrative work, it practically feels like both Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 3 are both part of the same package.

We’d spent the guts of 50 hours in the first major area, before the game suddenly opened us up to an even more detailed landscape. There is an astonishing amount of things to do. The game’s side quests, which range from comedy outings where you’re luring out wolves with a sheep that appears to speak English, to more serious ones like settling decades-old blood feuds, are a highlight.

The game’s setting is also incredibly rich. The rolling hills of mainland Europe are beautiful, and the game’s scenery is genuinely photo-real from certain vantage points. The houses, castles, and cities are also meticulously detailed. The game’s world has the feeling of the highest-budget costume drama you’ve ever watched.

“We’d spent the guts of 50 hours in the first major area, before the game suddenly opened us up to an even more detailed landscape. There is an astonishing amount of things to do.”

On PS5 Pro, the experience performs well, although when it tries to have a lot of people on screen at once in a dense area of foliage, things can really slow down. This improved somewhat with later patches, but it was still a chokepoint, performance-wise.

My biggest takeaway from Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is how tightly woven together it is. From the major plot threads to the tiniest interactions. There’s so much dialogue in the game, and so much of that has thousands of permutations based on what you did or didn’t do, what your stats are, and even what clothes you are wearing. It is an incredibly accomplished RPG that is punching well, well above its weight, and doing it with gusto.

There’s a cohesion to it. It’s not a game where the main plot is a bit thin, but the sidequests are amazing, every quest works hand in hand to make the delineation between the two largely pointless. There are also absolutely tons of them.

I had a passing respect for the original game, but it never quite worked for me. Much in the same way that when I first played CD Projekt‘s The Witcher 2, I could see what it was going for, but it didn’t quite achieve the dream until the next game. This is Warhorse Studio’s Witcher 3 moment.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an extremely confident, accomplished, dirty, hilarious, and massively enjoyable RPG. The game tries a lot of things and executes on almost all of them very well,  and its commitment to being ruthless must be applauded. Great visuals, vocal performances, and score put a cherry on top of a fantastic, if very mucky, cake.