Kingdom Come: Deliverance II Review: Playboys of the 15th Century

I spend most of my favorite days thinking, reading, or writing about the 15th century. I love reading the poetry of the 15th century. I’m currently working on a book project on a poet named John Lydgate, his mummings, and his audiences. 

I also find a lot of joy in medievalism, from books (currently reading Tracy Deonn’s Oathbound and Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword) to video games (Obsidian’s Pentiment being an all-time favorite).

That said, I skipped 2018’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance for various reasons. I was at the start of a PhD program. It came out a week after the excellent Shadow of the Colossus remake and the same week as Bayonetta + Bayonetta 2 on the Nintendo Switch. I also didn’t know what to make of the first game’s gameplay, its politics, or its approach to the Middle Ages. 

I came into Kingdom Come: Deliverance II with a similar trepidation. Its developer, Warhorse Studios, advertises the game with a certain amount of claimed authenticity, titling one of its recent trailers as “Live a Life Medieval.”

Let’s rip this bandage off: Please don’t play Kingdom Come: Deliverance II for its historical accuracy. Your local state or community college probably has a medieval history or literature course. Register for it! You’ll be glad you did, and you’ll learn some interesting, wondrous, and (frankly) weird things about the Middle Ages. 

With that out of the way: This review doesn’t approach the game based on historical accuracy. If anything, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is best enjoyed as a kind of Renaissance Faire rather than a 15th-century simulator. The game is at its best when it gives players freedom to explore. Sadly, the main quest has too many pain points where player autonomy is stripped, in favor of a trope-heavy narrative that feels ripped from a 2004 comedy sketch.

Medieval Red Dead…

As I noted in my review of the liminal horror game Dreamcore, I can be directionally challenged. This created real problems during some of the opening hours of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. Having not played the first game, I was a bit lost in terms of the story. The game’s map wasn’t immediately intuitive, and I found myself navigating without a horse.

Comparison to Bethesda’s Morrowind and Oblivion initially felt the most appropriate and, as the game’s developers have recently admitted, that inspiration is worn a bit on Kingdom Come’s sleeve. Gone are the dragons, in their place residing gorgeous countrysides filled with wolves, human conflict, and deer. Warhorse’s 15th-century world is one worth just getting lost in.

In this way, I found my experience with Kingdom Come: Deliverance II to be closer to my time with the first Red Dead Redemption. The longer I played through the medieval-themed game’s main story, its side quests, and its laundry list of activities, the more I found Rockstar’s “Old West” simulator to be a stronger touchstone. 

Like the first Red Dead Redemption, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II drops the player in the middle of a story that isn’t truly their own. From the first-person perspective of the young Henry of Skalitz, the player finds themself in the middle of 1403 Bohemia with the traditionally handsome Sir Hans Capon and a small retinue on a letter-delivery mission. Come to find out, there’s a bit of a conflict over a crown discrepancy.

Of course, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is a direct sequel, and I’m sure that it is picking up some of the narrative threads from the first game. I found being dropped in media res to be a nice narrative move. Warhorse rewards players for playing the first game but seemingly recognizes that new players have a home here too. 

I’m sure I missed out on jokes and more personal connections created in the first game, but my experience getting to know this world, its characters, and its conflicts felt well-structured and well-paced in the game’s opening hours. 

…From 2004  

Part of the ease of transition into the story of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is its narrative simplicity. I don’t want to spoil too much, but the game’s driving conflicts are trope-heavy. In terms of writing, this is not Rockstar’s horsey game. 

Early on, the writing of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II undercuts itself with a bit of boyish humor that feels more at home in a comedy movie about the antics of a frat house from the early 2000s than a piece of media in 2025. The game’s humor revolves around “pricks,” sex, getting drunk, and women. The jokes are dated and grossly inappropriate. There are moments where protagonist Henry and the game’s cast of mostly white men interrupt an otherwise serious moment to insert an untimely joke. 

The heavy focus on these young men’s sexual escapades leaves the few meaningful women among the game’s cast feeling like sexual objects to be won or discussed as medieval locker room talk. I found Katherine and Rosa’s stories so much more interesting when they didn’t relate to being potential romance options for Henry. 

Any romantic chemistry between characters (including with your main companion, Hans) feels cheapened by discussions of sexual interactions with women in bathhouses—a service that the player can pay for in nearly every town—or Henry’s sexual prowess (or lack thereof). I frankly found Henry and Hans to be two of the most unlikeable protagonists in some time. For most of the game, they are man-children. Their development into adulthood and responsibility feels more accidental than purposeful. Henry is a bit of a blank slate with a tragic past and the personality of an Amazon box. Hans, the more interesting of the two men, carries himself as spoiled aristocracy who consistently experiences humbling moments.

Persuasion Checks and Combat

To Kingdom Come: Deliverance II’s credit, every decision that you make as Henry legitimately matters in some way. Every choice I made in relation to stealing, conversation, or combat helped or hindered my progress later in meaningful ways. 

Every successful and failed conversation or choice to be pleasant or a jerk to NPCs is rewarded. If the player upsets the wrong folks in town, there will be harmful (and imaginative) consequences. Attempts at positive outcomes become a bit undercut early in the game with failed dialogue attempts (almost as if the NPCs also see Henry for the wet blanket that he is). 

I didn’t immediately intuit the conversation systems like other RPGs. It took me a while to begin understanding why I was failing to persuade other characters when I was investing so much time into cultivating the needed skills. There would be multiple times where I would attempt a medium or high difficulty persuasion (these are labelled when selecting dialogue choices), assuming that my skill level with that form of persuasion would work—often because it had worked before—only to find myself a little frustrated that it failed. 

To be fair, there are multiple reasons why one might fail at these, from not being well-liked in the little town that you are having the conversation in, to not meeting an abstractly defined threshold or not having bathed in a few days. Finding out that I could game these stats by changing Henry’s clothes was also a game changer. I felt like a little more tutorial time with these elements would have made these systems more explicit, and thus more impactful. 

I had similar experiences with combat, where the choice to practice or use certain weapons repeatedly rewarded me with improvements that I didn’t immediately feel but came to realize over time. 

Redemption in the Wilderness 

My frustrations with the plot and the unintuitive role-playing elements were always alleviated by returning to Kingdom Come: Deliverance II’s open world. The game is at its absolute best when it lets the player freely roam its open world.

My favorite experiences during my 75-hour playthrough were accidents or side quests. I loved the sounds of the wilderness, the attention to forestry details, and the ways that the game let me stumble into its strange little corners.

At one point, I was taken hostage by a knight stranded in a mine. At another point, I was asked to help get rid of demons in a castle—leading to some of the most humorous and meta jokes in the game. The side quests are surprising and, for the most part, well written.

I enjoyed being given opportunities to practice or be taught certain fighting or stealth techniques, and, in turn, leveling up these attributes. Freedom in the open world ultimately meant the freedom to develop Henry’s character in the ways that I wanted to. If I wanted him to be an expert with the longsword or glaive or just play a ton of dice games, the open world gave me that opportunity.   

Inversely, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II suffers when it takes the reins from the player. Main quests will often lock the character in a town, area, or single room. At its worst, it locks players into a scenario that they have never practiced or experienced in-game, where they can easily fail. For a game where choices matter, failing a story objective for making the “wrong” choice feels like an unfair punishment.

On multiple occasions during these same missions, I’d find an enemy in the game’s autosave. After failing, it would reload me in the middle of a fight without my weapon drawn. This led to a groundhog’s day event when an enemy kept killing me faster than I could draw my sword. In another instance, the game reloaded in the middle of a chase where the enemy was just far enough away that I’d continually fail before my horse would move. 

These pain points weren’t consistent, but happened enough that I grew frustrated, spoiling portions of the experience.

Final Thoughts

After an initially linear opening, I spent the first eight hours of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II just looking for my canine companion. The juxtaposition between these two beginnings (Henry’s main narrative start and the player’s open-world autonomy) really encapsulates my feelings about Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. I never found that I cared all that much about Henry, Hans, or the main plot. I never felt lost nor compelled. I don’t think this feeling would have changed had I played the first game. 

The game’s open world captured my imagination. I loved just riding around, completing blacksmith and alchemy tasks, and finding side quests. Just sitting in its vast forests or on the side of the road as folks ride past situate the player momentarily in an unmatched digital Renaissance Faire. This part of the game too has its problems; Kingdom Come: Deliverance II still presents an incredibly white Middle Ages with problems that plague popular medievalism. But for a moment, the harmony of birds singing, rivers flowing, and wildlife create an unforgettable experience.

In a brilliantly choreographed moment, these two worlds collide when you find Henry’s canine companion, Mutt. The main story beautifully folds into the open world, and this open world doesn’t feel like it is competing with the linear, choice-based narrative that Warhorse wants to tell. These moments are rare, but when they do land, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II rivals the feeling of playing Red Dead Redemption or Oblivion for the first time.

Score: 7.5/10

(Writer’s note: Prior to finishing this review, I didn’t think about the fact that the first Red Dead game came out in 2004: Red Dead Revolver. This was an unintentional additional parallel between the two franchises.)

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, developed by Warhorse Studios and published by Deep Silver, is available now on Windows PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. MSRP: $59.99 on PC, $69.99 on consoles.

Disclaimer: A review code was provided by the publisher.