The Middle Ages as you have never seen it before.
For better or worse, the historical era known as the Middle Ages is well known, partly for school memories, partly because it is an inexhaustible source from which the fantasy genre draws. The Witcher 3, after all, what is it if not an immense open world set in the Middle Ages, but seasoned with dragons, magic and "witchers"? Kingdom Come: Deliverance does something completely different. The comparison with The Witcher 3 fits: it is also an RPG, also open world. But it yields any fantasty claims right from the start.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is first of all an immense historical work, full of love for the documentation of places, environments and characters that really existed (we will tell you a little about the plot). Warhorse Studios is a small Bohemian team, and the development of the title took time, sacrifices and five years of work to be able to launch it simultaneously on consoles and PC. There are so many small technical and gameplay problems to be solved, but the direction is the right one and the game has bewitched us. Even without magic.
The civil war
Kingdom Come: Deliverance it is narrated completely in first person, with quick passages in third during cutscenes and dialogues with other characters in the game world. It tells personal stories but also of general history. We play the role of Henry, the son of a blacksmith who in reality was once much more than a blacksmith, who in the passage from adolescence to adulthood finds himself having to grow up sharply, due to the Bohemian civil war.
The succession to the throne of King Charles has in fact led to political instability in the entire country.
The heir Wenceslaus went down in history as "the lazy", and for a very specific reason: it seems he was able to drink and have fun, but he understood little about politics, and also of the relations between the state and the Roman church.
The nobles then ask for the intervention of another son of Charles: Sigismondo, and civil war breaks out in the country. In this contrast, Henry's village is annihilated, his parents killed. This is where our story begins, which will lead us to travel, explore and experience many important and interesting events in XNUMXth-century Bohemia.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance's narrative is just one of the title's many possibilities. We will also be able to completely ignore it to start wandering around what is, on balance, a gigantic open world, with the size of fourteen square kilometers. Anyway the plot is very interesting, the well-studied twists and turns of Henry, in general, leave the player with that good dose of desire for discovery to continue.
Impressive details
The risk with open worlds is always the one that they turn out to be full of nothing. Luckily with Kingdom Come: Deliverance it went well: the breadth of the game map cannot and does not want to keep up with that of any The Witcher 3, but the level of detail of every single place or environment (even closed ones) is really impressive. Entering any peasant hut, as well as a monastery or castle, you quickly realize that Warhorse Studios' documentation work has been excellent. The game world rendered on screen is extremely faithful to the late Middle Ages, with explicit references to the Bohemian one.
The chosen combat system based on sword fights (rightly, in the Middle Ages…) has left a bitter taste in the mouth. The idea was to make it equally faithful to reality, but a mechanism that was not so technical as it was difficult came out of it, also due to the not always precise responsiveness of the chosen commands. The sword can then be used to make thrusts and thrusts, and each thrust can be directed in a specific direction. Think a little about the system For Honor by Ubisoft. Now make it more complex. Here, this is Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
But the value of the title lies above all in its being a deep RPG, which in the best cases manages to reach very high peaks in its genre. We think not only about the personalization of the character, and the skills he can learn and master, but also about his physical needs that want to make us more and more involved in the game context.
Henry needs to eat, drink and sleep. If injured, it requires specific treatment based on the type of wound. We can't even save when and how we want, we need a specific alcohol called Grappa del Salvatore. And we could continue further, with the mounts, the steps of the horse (trot, gallop and so on), the number of armor and customizations present, the manageable throwing weapons. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a mammoth title.
Medieval technical department
The main flaw of Kingdom Come: Deliverance it is not in the low responsiveness of the
commands that are felt in more than one situation, but in its technical sector and especially in the optimization on consoles. On PlayStation 4 the frame rate becomes really obscene at times, and graphically you can feel the detachment from the PC counterparts.
There is also some certainty woodiness of the entire production, with the faces of the characters sometimes not very close to reality, too many interpenetrations and cases in which we remain closed inside the houses blocked by invisible walls. A little bit of the old story of Fallout 3: as beautiful as it is raw. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a bit of a halfway between The Witcher 3 and Fallout 3.
Final Comment
Potentially, Kingdom Come: Deliverance can aspire to the best RPG of 2018 as far as we're concerned. Of course, some (many?) Corrective patches will be needed first to make the gaming experience stable. More optimizations will be needed, especially on consoles. But the richness that the Warhorse Studios title has offered us has not been seen in a production of this type for a long time. Don't be fooled by the look of The Witcher 3-like: we recalled the Project Red CDs for due comparisons, but Warhorse Studios' historical work has a charisma of its own. That of a European title, which abandons fantasy to indulge in the luxury of historical realism.
