Kingdom Come: Deliverance Review - 5 Ups & 5 Downs

5. Down: Some VERY Outdated RPG Tropes & Design Choices

Kingdom Come: Deliverance can routinely feel like a game out of time - its very HUD upon first boot-up looks just like 2006's Oblivion.

Had it dropped back in the early 2000s, the world would have been agasp. “Look at those facial animations!”, they’d cry. “And then I went into the tavern, and I could talk to ANYONE” would come the hands-on previews. “I can also BE anyone, pick up what feels like ANYTHING – there’s an endless amount of possibilities”.

For as much as you can tell Warhorse wanted to replicate the open-ended sensation of exploring a Bethesda RPG before injecting their own innovative twists, Deliverance can feel positively archaic in some very basic respects.

Things like obfuscating inventory and UI management that won’t let you compare merchant items with what you have equipped, a Fable 1-esque “NPC awareness” where crimes committed indoors in the dead of night will still see you confronted by someone three towns over the next day. Even choosing to wait a few hours brings up one of the slowest moving animations I've seen in quite some time - one that bizarrely, slows down even more, the closer you get to resuming gameplay.

There's a fine line between traditional and outdated, and although KCD walks a tightrope between the two, more often than not it falls head-first into the oily soup of the latter.