False Expectations, a lttp Kingdom Come Deliverance review

[Legend]

It's been in my backlog for years but I still managed to go in almost completely blind. I had only ever seen a glitch compilation video and a combat video.

Besides that all I knew was that you were the son of a blacksmith and that the game was grounded in realism. You're a nobody and you have to get by in a cruel medieval world.

Compared to my expectations, the game is really generic. It has a lot of amazing immersive elements but it's standard power fantasy like Skyrim or Witcher. You are special and only you can save the day! Word of mouth from fans pretty much sold me on a completely different game. Sure the combat is hard in the early game but in the second half the story treats you like a one man army.

The great
The world is incredible. I expected the game to be individual maps for each city with automated fast travel between them, but it's a full open world. The cities are incredibly real feeling and the forests have a density that is rare in games. It's fun to just exist in this game.

You can talk to almost everyone. Their dialogue will be shared between NPCs and grayed out once you've already heard it from someone else, but it makes them feel more alive. For example if you want to learn about the ruler of the land, you can just talk to random people in the land. There's no need to find specific named NPCs.

Skill checks in dialogue are some of the best I've seen in a game. You can always say anything and you can't guarantee what will and will not work. The line itself has consequences too so often the game gives multiple options even if they use the same skill. Late in the game I did have a few issues though with dialogue not matching what I expected to say.

Every NPC walks from location to location and you can randomly catch them on the road.

The mixed
A lot of things are designed to be immersive, but they feel like artificial annoyances. For example you cannot save the game without an expensive consumable item. I understand the desire to make the actions permanent and have more weight, but it was pulled off poorly. Early on I cheated with console commands so I could save freely and ignore this mechanic. Otherwise I'd have lost many hours to glitches. Another example is that only 3 quests can be tracked at a time. The map is littered with icons worse than a ubisoft game yet you have to manually check if there is anything else you should do in a city before leaving.

The story and characters were enjoyable but not amazing. I was confused by the use of prerecorded cutscenes. Most of the cinematics are real time because you can slightly customize your character, but a few of them just replaced him with default Henry. I had a framerate counter while I played so it was really easy to tell what was what.

The story is linear and really restrictive, but the smaller moments often had a lot of different ways to approach them.

The bad

Even 4 years after launch the game has some issues with glitches. After just playing cyberpunk they felt like nothing, but I still had to deal with them. One sidequest I specifically had to reload 4 times because an NPC would break. I also had 2 quests that never progressed to the next stages, even though I finished them. Towards the end my character's neck developed holes in the mesh. No clue what caused it, but it was persistent even after restarting the game.

Most quests were unrewarding. You do them to grind xp and get rewards, not because they are fun or lead to bigger things. Lots and lots of fetch quests.

Many quest failure states were artificially harsh. You didn't do the dev intended path, therefore you did the wrong path and people hate you.

Your player character Henry is an idiot and does a few things that really should have been dialogue choices.

The ending.


I ended up using a fair amount of cheats to skip grinding and shorten my playtime. It still took 45 hours with me skipping a lot of side quests as well. I enjoyed the first half so much though.

8/10, warts and all.