Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 peasants dont get much respect (Deep Silver)The sequel to 2018s surprise hit historical RPG is more polished and better looking but are the Red Dead Redemption comparisons really warranted?If you missed the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance, it is not the standard issue fantasy role-playing game it may seem to be; its actually much closer to being a carefully researched medieval life simulator. With no mages or mythical beasts, the world you inhabit is a deeply stratified society in which peasants are considered inferior to townspeople, who in turn find themselves looking up to the aristocracy.Set in early 15th century Bohemia what is today the Czech Republic your character, Henry, is the son of a blacksmith and longtime friend of Lord Hans Capon, an aristocrat based on a real historical figure. At the beginning of the game, youre charged with a mission to deliver a message to a local dignitary. When things go wildly off the rails it leaves Henry penniless and alone, having to rebuild his life from scratch and still somehow complete his mission.Its the historically authentic version of the well-worn role-playing game trope that has your character losing all their powers after the introductory sequence. With no horse, weapons or armour you really are starting from the bottom of society and in a world of mud and squalor thats a pretty rank place to find yourself. Wearing ragged clothes and without enough money for the bathhouse, you look and smell like the lowliest peasant.At the start of the game, simply finding food and a place to sleep are your two most pressing concerns. Resorting to thievery and trespass can rapidly see you confined to a pillory in a village square, with passers-by tossing rotten vegetables at you. It turns out that being mistaken for a medieval peasant is a shortcut to a hard knock life.It also lets you start discovering the mechanics of rural Bohemian living. Your first order of business is finding gainful employment, which you soon discover comes with somewhere to sleep and a pleasing learning curve as you take up a trade. You also discover that undertaking the usual role-playing game tasks involves a far more significant effort and focus.Take brewing medicines and potions. Rather than just picking the right herbs and pressing X, here you have to look up the recipe in your book and prepare it step by step. It matters how many handfuls of each ingredient you add, the water, wine or oil you use as a base, and the length of time you boil each one as its added, timed using an hourglass next to your cauldron.Some ingredients need to be ground up in a pestle and mortar before being added and for certain concoctions youll also need to distil the resulting liquid before its ready to be bottled. Getting it up to boiling point means using bellows to get the fire nice and hot. Needless to say, even slavishly following a recipe your early brews will be weak and low quality but like everything in Kingdom Come the more you practise the better you get; although, as in life, that improvement occurs very slowly.Youll find similar levels of authenticity forging a sword or sharpening it after long term use. After getting into a fight your clothes will need a good wash and, probably, repair. Most garments can be mended by a tailor, but armour requires a blacksmith or a special kit if you happen to be far from a town or village. Its a complex ecosystem thats in constant flux and it affects more than just the protective qualities of your clothing.How you look influences how people treat you. Even with a high score for charisma, if youre dressed in beggars rags nobody will take you seriously. Even wearing costly finery, if its in a poor state of repair or youre spattered with mud and viscera, or smell like a latrine trench, youll attract suspicion, disgust or outright contempt especially from the upper classes.Stealth is just as complex. Theres no point trying to sneak into a building during the day, when nighttime offers far better opportunities for staying out of sight. Equally, anyone trying to creep around wearing plate armour is going to have a bad time. Optimal sneaking requires blending in, wearing dark, inconspicuous colours and soft-soled shoes, and if you take your thieving seriously youll soon engineer an entire separate outfit to facilitate your life of crime.While there are no magical shenanigans, there are still similarities to The Witcher, a fellow Eastern European, historically-orientated first person action role-player. Like Geralts adventures, few quests are as simple as they first appear and regularly develop unanticipated complications when an attempted burglary goes awry, or an intended good turn leads to tragic results. Not much of a first person shooter (Deep Silver)In an early quest, Henry and Hans are imprisoned and youre given 12 hours to clear Hans name before hes hanged. There are quite a few ways of going about that task. Doing chores for some of the artisans around the prison grounds, you discover clues that lead you to potential salvation in the form of a captain of the guard who can vouch for Hans.To get to him you can, amongst other possibilities, use stealth to sneak into the tower where hes being held; get invited inside to help with a job for a local or discover that a nearby well is in fact dry and can be used to infiltrate the cellars. It makes the world feel rich and open-ended, as though your interaction with it is a path of your own making, rather than simply a preordained corridor youre being funnelled along. Although sometimes thats not entirely true.Unfortunately, once youve done the chores, discovered the clues, evaded the guards, and successfully enacted your plan, you find out that the only way to complete elements of the quest is by opening several chests using your lockpicking skill. We had never picked a single lock before that moment, making it an effective dead end that sent us back nearly four hours of play time to go and spend many more hours picking every lock we could find to get our skills to a sufficient level to be able to continue.The game also suffers from a scattering of minor glitches, mostly graphical, but there were other quests where the games open-ended approach sometimes meant we got into situations that were effectively untenable, resulting in backtracking to older saves (a convoluted process that is effectively immune to save-scumming).Provided you have the time and inclination to work around them, none of those moments needed to be game-breaking, but it requires an attitude that embraces the enjoyment of a long journey even when it sometimes goes disastrously wrong. Life in the big city (Deep Silver)Red Dead Redemption and its sequel have a similarly mellow pace. Walking or riding on horseback, accompanied by detailed and characterful conversations, those games rely just as much on dialogue and a sense of place for their entertainment. Kingdom Come is similar. It may not have quite the richness of character that Rockstars games manage to evoke, but its landscapes, historical accuracy, and unabashed complexity make it somewhere to inhabit rather than just grind your way through.Taking place in two substantial open world areas, the second of which is trickier and more hostile, youll find villages, farms, and a large medieval city. There are also tracts of forest, harbouring nomad and bandit camps, and packs of wolves, all of which need to be dispatched in slightly clunky first person combat. Its smoother than its predecessor but is still not the games strongest suit, especially for the first couple of dozen hours when Henry remains relatively easy prey.Like the first game, its HUD comes with all sorts of delightful medieval flourishes, and the sequels far greater level of polish encourages you to enjoy the details of its improved graphics. The scenery is quite beautiful at times, taking on a completely different character in the early dawn mist, compared with the heat of a summers day or a sudden rainstorm.More TrendingVoice-acting is, once again, a little varied. Henry, Hans, and a clutch of main protagonists are first class, sounding charismatic and completely natural, while some more minor characters can be unintentionally comic, especially when they try and put on an accent thats quite clearly alien to them. Given the preponderance of wonderful British regional accents and the odd American drawl, were not quite sure why some felt the need to fake it, but in the main the acting is good even if theres only a couple of characters that sound even remotely Bohemian.If youve got the time and patience for it, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an immensely involving, and often uncompromising, historical simulator where your decisions always seem weighty and consequential. You really dont miss using magic, and if you dont mind a bit of slog getting there, its progression system and massive list of perks offer a huge degree of flexibility from talking your way out of problems to improving your trading, poaching, thieving, and even drinking skills.There are occasional misfiring missions, but you can always work your way around them, encouraged by a twisty plot full of political machination and changing allegiances; interspersed with long periods of living off the countryside or in one of its towns, as you upgrade your skills enough to continue. If you have sufficient leisure time, and enjoy complex games that refuse to hold your hand, Deliverance 2 delivers a rare sense of depth and intricacy.Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 review summaryIn Short: A complex and wildly ambitious medieval life simulator that basks in historical detail and will happily take over months of your life, even if its radical sense of freedom can create unintended impasses.Pros: Fabulously detailed simulation of everything from potion making to blacksmithing. Spectacularly varied and specific perks list, beautifully rendered Bohemian countryside, and an impressive sense of consequence to your actions. Some excellent voice acting.Cons: Still plenty of graphical glitches and awkward script moments especially any time romance is involved. Being unable to progress because of your skill level is always frustrating. Weak combat.Score: 7/10Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PCPrice: 44.99Publisher: Deep SilverDeveloper: Warhorse StudiosRelease Date: 4th February 2024Age Rating: 18 You can ride and chat (Deep Silver)Emailgamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below,follow us on Twitter, andsign-up to our newsletter.To submit Inbox letters and Readers Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use ourSubmit Stuff page here.For more stories like this,check our Gaming page.GameCentralSign up for exclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content.This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Your information will be used in line with our Privacy Policy