Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 Review: Learning to Love It

The first Kingdom Come: Deliverance was a far more punishing game than I’d become accustomed to in today’s modern RPG scene, so much so that it was borderline off-putting. Not being able to absent-mindedly save before every decision felt almost unfair, and why couldn’t my Henry be a mechanic-abusing super fighter right from the start? It was a cold splash of realism compared to many alternatives back in 2018, though that seemed to be the intent from developer Warhorse Studios.

Fast-forward to 2025 where we’re now getting the sequel, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and things are only somewhat easier on our hero, Henry, this time around. Saves are a bit more plentiful, combat is refined, and there’s plenty more to do to the point that you’ll often forget what your main quest is at times. It still feels arduous, but after spending plenty of time with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is quick to remind players that 15th century Bohemia doesn’t care much about you at all. Though Henry’s journey through the first game armed him with all sorts of skills and social standings, you’re quickly stripped of that progress in the sequel and are quite literally de-leveled so that you’re basically starting from scratch. It’s a bit of a heavy-handed way to reinvent the experience, but it makes sense in the context of the story, and they’re really no better way to kick things off.

Whether you played the first game or not, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is as humbling as ever before, and those humblings come in many shapes and sizes. Fighting one rogue bandit is easy enough to start, but fighting more than one without proper combat leveling or going up against someone who has even an ounce of training? I might as well have been using a wooden sword.

So, in true open-world fashion, the answer to remedying Henry’s pitiful existence was to do anything and everything besides the main quest. And even more so than the first game, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has plenty to do if you just want to roleplay as a multi-faceted traveler, a jack-of-all-trades with a main objective only in the back of their mind.

Alchemy is back in the sequel, a hobby which successfully derailed me multiple times until Henry’s stomach growled and my pockets were lined with coin from selling off a load of potions and poisons that left me overencumbered and crawling to a vendor. Blacksmithing makes its debut as well (the son of a blacksmith can finally make his own weapons!), and even more so than alchemy, it puts you in almost a trance-like state as you whistle along with Henry’s strikes on the anvil. Creating and selling wares and doubling your money by rolling dice is a lucrative way to bust Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2‘s economy wide open, sure, but more than anything else, Warhorse Studios has found ways to make even the most tedious of tasks enjoyable.

Ironically enough, it was often the less enjoyable happenings — the more frustrating and punishing ones that make you just want to throw your hands up — that really made Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 sing. Helping an innkeeper with all their favors only to still be denied a room and insulted because my area reputation was a smidge too low was harsh, but fair enough seeing how I did make some poor dialogue choices before. One of the best examples of this was a day-long quest starting at the crack of dawn where we visited town after town to perform different tasks which, in my mind, I completed with 90% efficiency in terms of what that quest-giver was looking for. That missing 10% was apparently enough to warrant an outright “I don’t like you” from the boss at the end of the quest with Henry basically told kick rocks and find his own way back to the quest’s starting point. Fast-travel is a thing, sure, but it was a quick reality check to re-humble Henry no matter what he was wearing or what level he’d gotten to.

While the reputation system, saving via Savior Schnapps or owned beds, and a myriad of tiny debuffs like being hungry, sleepy, stinky, bloody, or hungover do meld together to create a system that can feel quite punishing, it rarely ever feels unfair so long as you’re putting thought into what you’re doing next and how prepared you are. Best practices like drying food and checking in on your dog and horse frequently become second nature after awhile to make you feel like you’re truly working in tandem with the systems at play, not against them. Warhorse Studios also eased up on some of the more grueling parts of Kingdom Come: Deliverance as well. Saviour Schnapps feel more plentiful this time around whether you’re finding them or making them yourself, and the combat feels much better here with only small concessions made. Dropping the angular combat from a five-direction system down to just four (or fewer in some cases) makes a world of difference when managing attacks and parries and at least makes you feel like you can get out of a scuffle relatively unscathed.

But if I’m buying into the onerous requests of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, I need the game to play fairly as well, and that doesn’t always happen. While bugs were infrequent in the sequel, when they hit, they hit hard. A crash is debilitating in a game like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 where your immediate question is “when did I last save?” and getting stuck in a rock or under the map when you’re hours into an exploration is enough to make you want to quit for the night. It’s not a problem that’s unique to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 by any means, but I also often found that the dialogue choices didn’t always line up with what Henry would actually say. I’d try to keep my reputation largely positive with people so long as they were amicable, but Henry almost improvised some responses at times to result in a quick loss of reputation followed by a desire to reload.

It’s rare to see such a player-driven RPG where your successes and shortcomings are entirely your own doing despite many modern RPGs promising just that, but Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 delivers (so long as it doesn’t turn you away first). As unforgiving as it is, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 remunerates fairly for all it asks of the player and is supremely easy to get lost in.

Rating: 4/5

A PC review copy of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was provided by the publisher.