Swords really feel… sort of… heavy, until you get the hang of them (after intensive training) arrows you fire will nosedive after a few feet at first… not that it matters because there is no aiming reticle for archery, so you’ll be lucky to hit a bunny with an arrow even if you get close enough to push them through its fluffy little face (Don’t believe me? Check out this video of me trying to hunt hares, on day 3 of my first playthrough).Įven Henry’s speech options are noticeably poorer at the beginning lacking the finesse, in the early stages, to respond to tough questions with anything more witty than “Yeah? … well… you smell… so there!” I’m hesitant to say “it feels like learning to walk”, for fear that Warhorse Studios will make you learn to do that in their next game. So, you can believe me when I tell you that even basic skills in this game really feel earned. If I’m being completely honest, Henry is so useless at this early stage, that it took me three attempts to even run away without getting killed. Henry can’t read, knows nothing of warfare, can barely lift a sword or stay on a horse… which is precisely why the first real mission in this game is called “Run!” So, your village is burning, your parents and friends have been murdered and those same murderers are making their way up the hill towards you. Unfortunately, that is the very day Warhorse Studios give you control of the luckless Henry, and his unremarkable frame.
Silver Skalitz (Stříbrná Skalice), where the game begins, really was burned to the ground by the invading forces of King Sigismund of Hungary, on March 23rd, 1403 (a Wednesday… in case you were wondering). Its places are real places, many of its characters were real people (or in some cases, loosely based on real people), and many of the events you will live through as Henry of Skalitz, were taken right out of the pages of the Czech Republic’s long and brutal history. I say history because this game is steeped in it. He would probably have lived out the rest of his, presumably fairly short, life in complete obscurity, in the same little village where he was born, if history hadn’t just ridden through it with 1000 of its angriest soldiers, and burned it to the ground. Warhorse have gone for a whole new level of realism in the medieval RPG genre, and what’s more real than a common blacksmith’s son, whom no-one outside his tiny village either knows or cares about? No golden child, no beam of light overhead, no legendary Witcher, dragon hunter or forgotten young wizard-under-the-stairs… Henry of Skalitz is just an ordinary young boy who can barely even lift the sword his father has just finished making for a local nobleman, much less swing it, when the game begins. Your character cannot read when the game begins. Which comes to mind because one of the many skills you must spend in-game time learning in KCD is reading. Kingdom Come: Deliverance (hereafter referred to as KCD, because life is too short to keep typing that), for those of you who might not know, is an open-world, medieval RPG that starts you on the bottom rung, in a way I don’t think I’ve experienced since learning to read and write my own name. Remember the Elite: Dangerous preview? Yeah… that long. So, strap yourselves in because it’s going to be a long one. It is this game that has lured me back to the pages of this long-neglected blog. And, the game which launched this new venture, was Warhorse Studios debut title: Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Most recently though, in an effort to keep some content on YouTube when I have neither camera nor crew, I turned back to gaming videos, and started a new YT channel, devoted entirely to gaming, game reviews, game news etc. Okay, so a number of things have happened, but most of them involve husband and wife, both trying to run businesses from home, whilst passing a bored toddler back and forth between them. Didn’t you see the number of hours I have spent in this game? Yes, yes, yes… let’s not get bogged down with all that tedious “Where the f**k have you been for the last 9 months? We all thought you were dead!” business.
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