2/5 ★ – Hazzi's review of Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

I came into Kingdom Come Deliverance expecting a tough, grounded medieval experience. What I got was a game that mistakes sluggish mechanics, arbitrary difficulty spikes, and frustrating design for “realism.” Combat is a joke. Punches take over a second to land, and you can’t even block until the game decides you’ve “learned how.” A young, fit man gets winded after four seconds of fighting, but somehow a malnourished thug can knee me to death while I’m wearing armour. The AI doesn’t care about stats, only that you haven't "progressed enough." The difficulty isn’t a curve, it’s a wall followed by a nosedive into being too easy after enough grinding. The AI is just as absurd. I sit down for a dice game at dusk, and a guard fines me for not carrying a torch... even though I’m sitting next to a candle. I go to sleep in my own bed and get woken up just to be fined for the same thing. I leave town, come back later, and suddenly I have a warrant out for my arrest because I wasn’t holding a torch. Meanwhile, the night before, I robbed half the town and killed two guards, and nobody seemed to care. The game’s law system is a joke. I got arrested and thrown in jail, serving my sentence like a good citizen. While in jail, I got arrested again. Why? Because I didn't have a torch. While serving jail time. The guards of Bohemia apparently expect prisoners to walk around their cells at night holding a lit torch. The survival mechanics are just as ridiculous. You get hungry every few minutes and dirty after taking a short walk. The lockpicking system is borderline unplayable on a controller. The save system forces you to use special potions or reach specific checkpoints, meaning you can lose hours of progress simply because the game refuses to let you save when you want to. And every time these issues are brought up, defenders of the game have the same tired responses. “It’s realistic.” “Just play for 10 hours, it gets better.” “Skill issue.” No, a good game doesn’t demand you suffer through hours of frustration before it becomes enjoyable. Kingdom Come Deliverance could have been great, but instead, it’s an unbalanced, tedious mess that hides behind the excuse of realism.