Okay, I've had just about enough of this game.
This is a low budget European studio stretching their money to the limit to create a beautiful, fully-realized world, which they do through copy-pasting hordes of 'Villager' and 'Townsperson' NPCs everywhere, and through having really quite lovely graphics. The force of the CryEngine is on full display here, and it is genuinely impressive. It makes me wonder why more people didn't pick it up, since if this is what you can do with the CryEngine on a limited budget, I'd love to see what big studio could do.
However, the game itself is complete and utter dogwater.
Firstly, the combat. I challenge you to somehow spin this as 'good' combat. During the story every enemy is basically a joke when they expect you to fight at all, and when they do it's almost always 1 on 1 and the enemy is laughably easy. Outside of the story, basically every enemy is a god that is way better than they have any right to be, way better than you.
This wouldn't be such a big problem except the combat system is just awful.
Whenever the game determines you are 'in combat' and near enough an enemy, it locks onto them. Then, you get five different points on a five-pointed star basically on your HUD (this feels so stupid while I am describing it I wonder how they managed to settle on this) and depending on which of these five points you move your mouse toward, pressing LMB gets you a different attack.
This sounds great, except the difference between all of these is essentially meaningless, and the list of 'combos' in this game that your guy can execute by combining these different moves, is horrifyingly limited, and all of them are COMPLETELY useless. This is because of one concept the game does its best to not tell you anything about: the Master Strike.
You can 'perfect block' any attack by pressing Q with good timing, as an enemy attacks (or only some attacks, or maybe the green shield icon only sometimes shows up, maybe it's buggy, I don't have any clue) and when you do that you get a chance to make a counterattack. Or you can just choose to not do that. But there exists an even higher level of a 'perfect block' and that is a Master Strike.
Master Strikes are when you press Q to block, just as the enemy attack comes out and what happens is, you automatically subtract some HP from the enemy and shove them away into the 'neutral' we'll call it. Which is just great because I love being able to execute attacks that actually reset the neutral completely and don't let me continue the assault which is basically your every method of attack in this game. Great.
Because 'perfect blocking' is so easy to do and so permitted by the game, this means often it can be extremely hard to even do a single point of damage to anyone. This is where Master Strikes come in by guaranteeing damage.
And this is where the game dies. Because now you have a situation where, 'high level' enemies will just instantly Master Strike your sorry ass any time you try to even attack them let alone get a combo off which requires attacking multiple times in a row. Any attack you make, combo or not, can be Master Striked, so because of this, the actual best way to fight most enemies in almost any situation is just don't do anything, and simply Master Strike anyone that tries to attack you.
Even the LOWLIEST naked Bandit you find on the side of the road dying of plague and ridden with desperation, CAN AND WILL MASTER STRIKE YOU. Which just makes this game 'great' fun - you want to play a game where you stab, slice, cut, slash and butcher bad guys, and then you just get a game instead like this where trying to attack at all puts you in more danger than the guy you are attacking.
Sweet lord. I have no idea how they even thought any of this was a good idea. It's just junk.
So aside from that 'awe-inspiring realistic melee simulation' which the game is very proud of - its 'HEMA' approved (Historical European Martial Arts) garbage... well, you may have captured the animations, but actually playing this out is horrendous and in my view doesn't bear any resemblence to real life anyway. And it's just because of how buggy everything is. Enemies clip through you, clip into the sky, clip through your horse, clip through your guard, whatever. They could probably clip through the game itself and Master Strike you in real life, given the chance.
So for me, any argument of this being 'realistic' or 'simulationist' is just complete BS, it's nonsense, and arguing the point is completely pointless. And, let's not forget that this doesn't seem to have any consideration for 'fun'. Fun is a big important part of games and if you want fun this is NOT it. I would recommend Mount & Blade over this, or perhaps Age of Chivalry or the Chivalry games. This whole concept was basically solved by those, in the case of M&B like 20 years ago.
I feel like if you've ever played any good action game, like any Japanese game, the immediacy of those is much more satisfying. I don't really love Sekiro but that's a much better example of, combat that doesn't necessarily feel realistic at all, but it is fun and snappy. Of course, here the goal is obviously just 'realism' for the sake of realism. But - it sucks. I think they could have found a way to make it realistic, but also fun, and they did not do that. They chose to not do that. The lock-on system alone is so anti-player.
Aside from this: I want to talk about how their decisions to animate so much 'first person' stuff, in this game, is genuinely sickening. If you suffer from motion sickness or anything like that, you WILL hate this game, it will be physically painful to play Kingdom Come: Deliverence, because your face, meaning your character's view, will just get moved around constantly and shoved into knees or spun around or whatever, without any warning and it is HORRIFYINGLY unpleasant.
I am sure the developers were aware of this but just chose to not care because there's no other way to make this game entirely first person except to do this. This doesn't make it any less terrible to deal with. This is why, for the most part, games like Skyrim will put you in third person for animations such as your character sitting down or whatever.
The story is so terribly told that I just don't care. I'm not even gonna go on about it. It's just terrible. It's bad. It's pointless. Your guy 'Henry' is somewhat charming at times and has some amusing dialogue from time to time, and I think Sir Radzig is an interesting character, but it's all so ineptly done that I find it hard to care. An example is, Henry's mother in this game is just called like, 'Henry's Mother'. Many many many NPCs across KCD are just not named which seems a massive oversight, because it destroys immersion.
You find a guy on the road, his name is just Wayfarer. You find a guy working a farm his name is Farmer. Ugh. Basically only anyone who has a quest, or is related to a quest, or can be interacted with, has a name and basically every other character is just like... scene-filler, and you as a player, can instantly intuit this, it is NOT immersive in the least.
I also like to refer to this game as 'a Skyrim' because it at its core has a gameplay loop of: go to wilderness, find loot (on bandits probably), go to town, sell loot, rinse repeat.
I feel in every way, that while this is a half-decent attempt to build a Skyrim by a dev studio with not a lot of money and no real idea of what they are doing, it's still by far too frustrating for me to recommend, I just hated playing this game every step of the way and never felt like I was being rewarded. I kept on playing this game, thinking well now it'll get really good, after this it'll start to get good, it's gonna get good soon - but it never did.
It at least made me curious to play the sequel, since SURELY the sequel is better, but we'll just have to see about that when I get to it...
