Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is the first must-play game of 2025 — here’s my verdict after 45 hours

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a game about consequences. During an early quest, I was tasked with playing peacemaker between a helpful hag and a rich landowner. My attempts to smooth things over with the latter went poorly and our conversation came to lethal blows.

Hiding his body in some nearby bushes (after looting for him whatever Groschen he had in his pockets. In for a penny, in for a pound), and without any witnesses nearby, I believed I’d committed the perfect crime. However, the local guards soon deduced that the recent arrival of a stranger, and the disappearance of the well-respected citizen were likely connected.

Upon my next visit to the town, I was immediately arrested and forcibly branded on the neck by a red hot poker. This marked me as an immoral swine, and villagers refused to associate with me. This painful branding lasted for several in-game days, and not a moment of this memorable quest was scripted. It was all the result of my (foolish) decisions, and I have numerous stories like this after playing some 40 hours of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

This sequel to the promising (but technically flawed) 2018 original is one of the deepest role-playing experiences I’ve ever encountered. You can approach almost every situation from a staggering number of angles, and the end result will often be anything but expected. Let me explain why Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a wonderfully immersive adventure.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2: The Basics

• What is it? Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a medieval role-playing game where you play Henry, the son of a blacksmith, in 15th Bohemia. Like its predecessor, KC:D 2 prioritizes authenticity above all creating a believable and realistic historical world.
• Who is it for? If you’re seeking a slower-paced, and more deliberate, experience you may be quite taken with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. It’s also a game that refuses to hold your hand and offers quests that can be completed in multiple ways.
• What's the price? The Standard Edition costs $69. There's also a Gold Edition for $89, which includes the Gallant Huntsman’s Kit and the Expansion Pass giving you access to three upcoming DLCs.
• What other games has the developer made? Warhorse Studios has made two games in its 13 years of existence: Kingdom Come: Deliverance and its sequel, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.
• What games is this similar to? While Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 takes some cues from popular fantasy RPGs like The Witcher 3 and Baldur’s Gate 3, it's also rather unique due to its focus on realism.

Journey through history

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 invites you to step back through history to 15th-century Bohemia, where you take the role of Henry, a blacksmith’s son and ward of a nobleman, Sir Hans Capon. Fans of the first game will feel right at home, but newcomers are catered to with plenty of early game exposition to get you up to speed and familiar with past events.

While Henry is a fixed character (ala Geralt in The Witcher franchise), you can shape him as you see fit. If you want to be the brash type that looks to resolve every tavern disagreement with fists or even cold steel you can make Henry a hot-head brawler. However, I opted for the more civilized path, creating a Henry with a shiny silver tongue and a knack for knowing just the right thing to say — and when talking fails my Henry is still pretty skilled with a blade.

Henry might be the main character and protagonist, but Bohemia is the real star of the show. The game’s vast open world is split into two sizeable maps, and both locations are simply marvelous to explore. In other historical RPG series such as Assassin’s Creed, the world never quite manages to successfully approximate the feeling of a real place, but Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s Bohemia offers an unparalleled sense of Middle Age authenticity.

On more than one occasion, I abandoned my current quest and instead lazily wandered the open world, taking in the sights and sounds of 15th-century Europe. These moments of historical tourism were just as enjoyable and significant as any scenes in the main story.

A true role-playing experience

When I’d finally had enough aimless exploration and set about actually playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, I was met with an RPG that is remarkably committed to realism (or at least, as realistic as it’s possible to get in a video game where reloading after death exists).

Everything in the world of Kingdom Come feels deliberate and methodical. In most modern RPGs, crafting a new sword would involve collecting the right materials and then tabbing through a couple of menus. Here, you must forge your weaponry yourself, and if you want the weapon to be sharp afterward, you better sit at the grinding wheel and sharpen it. This considered and laborious approach can be found in everything from alchemy to fast travel.

Henry also has numerous status meters that you must monitor constantly. You need to eat when he’s hungry, sleep when he’s tired, and wash yourself when he starts to smell bad. Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 removes so many modern conveniences players now take for granted, that initially, it can all feel a bit unfair. But you’ll soon come to appreciate the way it makes each action have a real purpose. And frankly, it’s probably the only RPG where you’ll get a gleeful sense of satisfaction from having washed your favorite pair of breeches.

However, the game occasionally falls on the wrong side of the line between frustration and fun. The need to eat adds little beyond another gauge to monitor — not helped by food spoiling quickly. Medieval bread goes moldy within mere hours — and the refusal to rework the first game’s controversial save system feels like stubbornness on the developer’s part.

To manually save, you need a specific potion. It’s not especially hard to brew up a batch. However, in a game where costly mistakes are easy to make and stumbling upon a group of bandits on your travels usually means certain death, having such a restrictive save system feels overly punishing. You will often lose tangible progress, and that is a major annoyance.

I need your help with something

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 does an awful lot well, but its quest design is the area where it shines brightest. Not only are the vast majority of quests extremely well-written, but there’s also a frankly ludicrous amount of them. There might be too many. I felt utterly overwhelmed when I entered the game’s second zone as my map was immediately inundated with icons.

While the mandatory quests are usually pretty epic (Plus, they are where you get to spend time with Sir Hans, the game’s best character), you shouldn’t skip the side quests. The majority introduce you to interesting secondary characters, throw engaging moral dilemmas at you, and feel as hand-crafted and vital to the experience as anything on the golden path.

Most impressively about Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s quests is that almost all of them can be completed in more ways than you can count. And I’m not just talking about a simple choice between stealth or open combat. Many quests offer more than half a dozen different branching paths resulting in quest lines and final outcomes that feel unique to your Henry.

My preferred approach was to talk my way out of danger, but sadly, even the sharpest tongue cannot out-slice a scimitar, and sometimes you will be forced into combat. Like everything else in Kingdom Come, the game’s combat is demanding. Mindlessly slashing will get you killed, so instead, you must carefully aim your strikes and account for the enemy's armor. There’s no point stabbing the chest of somebody wearing a steel breastplate!

While the combat is more polished than in the first Kingdom Come, with a simplified directional wheel being a big help, it still feels overall stiff and often unnecessarily restrictive. Furthermore, skirmishs become hugely imbalanced when you throw in extra combatants. Several main quests place you in larger-scale battles with multiple swordsmen on each side, and these sequences are an unwelcome showcase of wonky animation and poor AI.

You polish up well

Kingdom Come: Deliverance was a technical nightmare at launch. It was so bad upon release in 2018, I shelved the game for two years and didn’t return until 2020. I’m delighted to report that during my time with Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 for this review, the amount of bugs, glitches and graphical oddities I experienced were well within my tolerance levels.

That’s not to say there are none to be found. If you go looking for bugs in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, you will find them. But unlike its predecessor, where crashes and quest-breaking issues were common, the glitches this time are smaller and amount to forgivable sins like a few dropped frames in hectic moments and some texture pop-in.

However, I did experience one glitch that prevented me from completing a (smaller) side quest. This was particularly irritating as the task was subsequently auto-failed after I progressed further in the story, so I couldn’t even circle back later. Fortunately, this was the only major issue I’ve encountered in more than 40 hours, and my hard crash count is zero.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2: Verdict

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is an astonishingly engrossing RPG. Its many quests are well-crafted and driven by player choice, and its main story is steeped in intriguing and period-accurate political and social issues. However, I could easily see its deliberate and realism-first approach being an inaccessible barrier to enjoyment for less patient players.

If you’re looking for instant gratification or an RPG with streamlined gameplay, you should steer clear of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. But, if you’re looking to role-play in a truly authentic setting that reacts to your actions in convincing ways, you will delight in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s practically unmatched levels of medieval immersion.