Kingdom Come Deliverance is a medieval RPG game created and published by Warhorse Studios and co-published by Deep Silver, Kingdom Come Deliverance was first released in 2018 and this new version the Royal Edition, is the base release for the Nintendo Switch which comes with all the past DLC to give the players the full experience of the title.

The campaign for Kingdom Come Deliverance is set in the 15th century within the Kingdom of Bohemia, where there just so happens to be an internal conflict, a king has died and left the empire in the hands of his son. Frankly, the new king is useless, he’s more interested in eating and drinking than dealing with his duties. You’ll play as Henry, a blacksmith’s son, he’s nothing special, a peasant to most you’ll have him on a journey of first seeing the place he lived in burnt to the ground, seeing loved ones killed, and he seems to be in the middle of the situation no matter where he goes.

The Kingdom of Bohemia is a harsh and unforgiving place, the verdant countryside hides all manner of bandits and corrupt lawmakers. The game wants you to feel how difficult this world is for a common novice because learning to navigate it is a brutal experience.

As you start the game you will learn how stats and mechanics are used, as you can juggle them around to suit your desired playstyle. Like many other RPG games, you will need to battle against the human body with the urge to eat, so you will need to keep your body fed and healthy to stay in top form.

You can bathe to keep a reputation with the other folks of Bohemia, cause honestly who wants to talk or deal with someone who smells like a barnyard, and sleeping is a must also as you don’t want to be caught off guard as combat starts. I will be honest, the starting segments are hard to get used to and felt very slow, but it does all fall into place especially when you start gaining levels and making survivability more easygoing.

The combat and difficulty overall are harsh but rewarding, position is key for combat as you will need to pick where to swing an attack with the left stick. The majority of the time you may not land a clean hit so you will need to feint attacks to have the target expose themselves for a clean hit. I do like this style of combat as it reminds me of the multi-directional combat that other medieval combat games use.

Visually there is a downscale in comparison to other platforms, while playing undocked I didn’t notice the smaller issues until I had it docked, on a bigger display mainly textures popping in and being out of frame, and just how empty the characters looked while in narrative segments. But the world that Warhorse has created for Kingdom Come Deliverance is a great one to behold and worth the adventure itself.

The voices of the characters but most importantly the ambient sounds when exploring, hearing birds chirping while standing around in an open meadow was oddly relaxing after I had just been in a hectic fight. The music created for the game was well done and fitted greatly into the era of the game bringing it all together. Warhorse has done a great job with the audio.

In conclusion, Kingdom Comes Deliverance is an experience that fans of medieval RPG players should play if you have not done so already, being the Royal Edition it makes for a great pick-up to experience all the DLC as you progress. While the Switch version does have a clear downscale, it also suffers from crashing issues that set back progress as the auto-save triggers after finishing a quest, hopefully, this gets patched soon.

Written by: Shane Walsh