Direct sequels in games are funny things, aren’t they? As narrative contrivances go for honouring all the choices you made and characters you built in the first part of the story, there are usually two schools of thought on how to keep building on that foundation effectively. One is the Star Wars Jedi: Survivor route, where developers rummage even deeper into their bag of tricks and somehow emerge with even wilder skills and abilities that make the first game’s power curve look like training wheels.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 reviewDeveloper: Warhorse StudiosPublisher: Deep SilverPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out on 4th February on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), PS5, and Xbox Series X/S
But then you get games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, which strip their heroes right down to their pants and have them flee for their lives into the hills. I mean that quite literally here. Picking up immediately after the events of the first game, blacksmith-turned-squire Henry and his idiot lord-in-chief Hans Capon have trotted off to Trosky to broker peace with the enemies of King Wenceslaus. Alas, your trumpeted arrival is cut short when Capon’s lusty appetites get the better of him and he goes swimming in the nearby pond to chase some nearby giggling women. Unfortunately for the rest of their travelling party, this is the exact moment a band of local bandits decides to attack and murder everyone, causing Henry and Capon to flee with nothing but their soggy bottoms intact.
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A daft and cringeworthy setup in equal measure, but it nevertheless does an effective job of doubling the stakes for this sequel. Not only are you in hostile and unfamiliar territory here, but you’ve also got to claw back all the trust and status you lost so everything you worked for in the first game isn’t completely for naught. Strangely, though, the game doesn’t seem all that bothered about what those earlier events actually were most of the time. After picking one of three classes to determine your starting crop of strengths and perk points, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 effectively acts as a clean slate to what’s come before. Some of Henry’s previous escapades are occasionally referred to in passing when chatting idly with NPCs, but there’s no long-drawn character sheet building or decision porting like in Mass Effect or The Witcher, and your answers have little bearing on anything at all.
1 of 4 Caption Attribution This is a frequently beautiful game with a sense of scale that regularly impresses, with strings of rundown, muddy hamlets eventually giving way to imposing hilltop fortresses (bottom left), which are in turn dwarfed by the enormous walled metropolis of Kuttenburg later on (bottom right).
For new players, it’s refreshing not to have a whole game’s worth of baggage bearing down on you in these moments. Then again, with zero accompanying context on what any of these names and places mean, it can’t help but alienate at the same time, making you feel adrift in a sea of missing back story. Likewise, for returning players hoping for more of a throughline with their version of Henry, the throwaway nature of these moments may come across as something of a disappointment.