I spent the game honing Henry’s speech skill, which is improved by successfully convincing people to see your side of things in conversations. There are, thankfully, some mid-mission autosaves too, often before a difficult section.įor those of us who prefer to avoid combat altogether, you can usually talk your way out of trouble. Limiting saving to these two options is frustrating at times, but it does give your decisions more weight knowing you can’t just easily reload and try again. You can quicksave as well, but doing so requires bottles of expensive booze called Saviour Schnapps that have the unfortunate side effect of getting you drunk. Sleep in a bed and your injuries will heal, and if you own or are currently renting the bed from an innkeeper, the game will save. Keeping him fed, rested, and healthy is something that requires constant attention. Henry can get sick, tired, hungry, drunk, hungover, overfed, malnourished, and a dozen other status effects that will make him less handy in a fight. You can improve your chances by wearing multiple layers of armour, but being draped in plate and chainmail has its drawbacks too, negatively impacting your stamina. In battle you’ll sustain injuries that will seriously hamper your ability to fight, and a bad one usually means you’re done for. It doesn’t help that Henry is a fragile soul. But it’s when you’re facing multiple enemies at once that things get really difficult, and I rarely survived an encounter with more than two foes, even thirty hours into the game. You can swing your weapon in five directions, and fights boil down to second-guessing your opponent’s next move and reacting accordingly. Make the slightest mistake and you’ll end up dead, which forces you to think carefully about each strike, block, parry, and feint. Melee combat in Kingdom Come is weighty and violent, and every battle feels important. Throw in some crashes to desktop and other janky weirdness, and you’re left with a game that sorely lacks polish.Īnother thing to note about Henry is that, while he can handle himself in a fight, he’s far from a master swordsman. Or the conversation that looped the same three lines of dialogue over and over, forever. But sometimes it’s more severe, like the archery contest where my opponent refused to take his shot, trapping me in an endless limbo. There’s relatively harmless stuff like characters getting stuck on walls or floating in mid-air in cutscenes. The simulation is dense and complex, but also feels like it could collapse at any second. Like many games with this level of depth and ambition, Kingdom Come is plagued by bugs. And all of this is a product of the game’s rich, all-encompassing simulation, rather than a series of scripted events arranged by a designer.īut this all comes at a cost. But this might wake him up, and he won’t take kindly to you being on his property. But he has dogs, and they’ll bark if they hear you creeping around, so you have to deal with them too-either by distracting them with some discarded meat or, if you can live with yourself, killing them as they sleep. You can approach him during the day and simply ask to buy it, or you can sneak into his house at night and steal it while he sleeps. One quest involves stealing something from a man’s house, and gives you an early taste of this reactivity. It’s by no means a perfectly accurate recreation of what life was actually like in the Middle Ages-Henry would probably die of dysentery or something in the first act if it was-but it does a good enough impression of one. And there’s something refreshing about how it trades these familiar fantasy tropes for something more understated and realistic. You’ll never cast a spell, slay a vampire, or fulfil an ancient prophecy. There are no goblins, enchanted swords, or mages. Kingdom Come is an RPG without the dungeons or dragons. But his spirit and determination keep his head mostly above the water, and he’s an effective guide through the complicated culture and politics of this harsh, unsympathetic medieval world. As he reluctantly leaves his old life behind, becoming a page for a lord who takes a shine to him and finding himself on the frontline of a bloody war, he’s just as overwhelmed by everything as you are. He’s so normal, so unassuming, that his presence provides a firm, relatable foundation for the story. There isn’t much to him, but I think that’s the point. It helps that Henry is such a likeable hero.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |