Kingdom Come: Deliverance has quite the breaking-in period. I’ve played games like this before. A game that you try and play every now and then, hoping that the lightning will strike, but eventually you put it back in the cupboard to continue collecting dust. However, one of the main parts of reviewing games is actually playing them, so I had to lock the cupboard this time. But I’ll be damned if Kingdom Come: Deliverance didn’t suck me in. Eventually. After almost biting through my Switch screen in frustration.
It’s a game that throws a whole pile of mechanics at you, all of which are held together with sellotape and prayers. It’s fragile, frustrating and genuinely interesting. But there’s little point in me just singing Kingdom Come: Deliverance’s praises six years after it came out. So this is going to be a review in two parts. I’ll start off with my thoughts on the game in general – as this is the first time I’ve managed to play a decent chunk of it – then I’ll go through how it feels to play it on the Nintendo Switch.
Sword Delivery Service
The first hook that caught me was the setting. Kingdom Come: Deliverance is set in Bohemia in 1403, which is in the midst of a civil war. On the one hand, there’s King Wenceslaus, the true heir to the throne. He’s a shadow of his father, Charles IV, so Wenceslaus’s half-brother Sigismund decides to sort things out himself, in a very bloody, burn-y way. This leads him to burn down the village of Skalitz, which is unfortunate as that’s where our hero lives. Henry is a blacksmith’s son, who was enjoying a life of girls, ale and smithing. Sadly, that goes sideways when Skalitz is burned down and his parents are butchered.
I really like this historical setting. A lot of RPGs would just slide a handful of orcs over the table and tell us to go nuts. I appreciate a game that tries to teach me something. What’s more, it’s nice to play someone who’s right at the bottom of the social ladder. A large portion of the story is Henry just trying to deliver – and then recover – the last sword he and his Dad forged. He’s just an insiginificant peasant, swept up in a war that’s much bigger than him and all he cares about is doing right by his father. It’s a personal story dressed in the trappings of a war story.
There’s a lot of mechanics that reflect his status too. Tatty or dirty clothes will damage speech checks, for instance. You’re also not a big, grand hero so you can’t pull rank with the aristocracy. You’ll just get a signet ring across the chops. In fact, Kingdom Come: Deliverance has a ton going on in the background. There’s the usual hunger and sleep meters – the baseline for RPGs these days – but there’s also period-appropriate mechanics. Henry can’t read, for example, as it wasn’t a requirement for his expected job. So if you want to learn potion recipes, you need to learn your letters. An unexpected and really quite interesting mechanic.
Beaten With A Switch
In fact, there are only two mechanics that I have any real problem with. I imagine they’re the ones that everyone complains about when they talk about Kingdom Come: Deliverance. First up is the combat. It’s one of those directional systems, where you have to swing from the right angle to get around enemy defences. It’s rather overly fiddly, not least because there’s six directions to choose from, but I found myself getting the hang of it. What kills it is the clunkiness. There’s a massive delay between pressing swing and Henry actually putting his weight behind it, making combat feel sticky and unsatisfying. Fights usually just devolved into button mashing as it never felt like me and Henry were connected.
The issue is compounded by the limited save system. It’s not been long since my last rant about this. Saving is done by quaffing a drink, essentially meaning you only have a set number at a time. So when heading towards combat, you have to essentially guess whether you’ll need to save or not. You can craft the save drinks, but this is a lot of busywork. What really hurts it though is that Kingdom Come: Deliverance is extremely unstable on the Switch. It crashed about once an hour. I don’t know if it’s a Switch only problem, but it made the limited saves all the more frustrating.
But how does it fare on the Switch in general? Well, I liked that I could play it wherever. The amount of deep RPGs I can play while slouched in bed is pretty small. The positives sort of stop there though. For one, the Switch version looks awful. Characters all have faces made of putty and the draw distance is atrocious. Walking through a meadow causes flowers to sprout just in front of Henry’s feet. Either he’s embodying the spirit of Gaia or Kingdom Come: Deliverance is desperately trying to compress the world so it’ll run on the Switch. The tiny buttons didn’t help with the fiddly combat either.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance – Pauper Edition
So, let’s sum up the two halves we’re dealing with. On the actual game side, I rather like Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I only had time to play up to the point where I confront the bloke who nicked our sword and crack him over the head with a mace but it’s very absorbing. I’ll probably keep playing after this review goes live. Punching upwards from the bottom rung of society is an inspiring story, even if the actual punching mechanics are a little frustrating.
I cannot fathom why you’d play something like this on the Switch though. This might be a personal feeling, but this is best suited for PC. You can handle the combat with a mouse or chunky controller if you’d prefer and you’d get access to stability and optimisation mods. If you’re determined to play Kingdom Come: Deliverance on the go, though, then you’ll have to deal with heavily reduced graphics, constant instability and fiddly controls. Take my advice, it’s not worth it. Kingdom Come: Deliverance deserves to be played on something with more grunt.
