

When it works, it's a martial dance of careful timing and study as you watch an opponent to see where their guard leaves them vulnerable. You also see your viewpoint spin when someone lands a meaty blow, mimicking the disorientation you feel for real when someone smacks you. Stamina stops you going all out, and if you're hit while breathless you take lasting damage. One cannot simply slice a plated opponent like a ham.Ĭombat revolves around attacking and defending areas governed by a kind of directional wheel. Swords and fighters are physical objects clad in all sorts of physical armour objects which react in unique ways. The meticulous eye for detail spreads into the game's systems, the standout being the most realistic recreation of sword fighting I've seen in a game. :: The 20 best Xbox One games you can play right now This is a living world, made of rain and sunshine and even bone-shaking thunderstorms. In the forests there's the hushed atmosphere a leafed roof brings, as deers scarper and hares and rabbits startle. The game's rural beauty frequently stopped me in my tracks.īetween the settlements is the tranquility of the countryside, birds trilling and flowers gently swaying. Everywhere there are windows like this into the past. Inns emerge naturally as the town's beating heart - the first port of call for a traveller who can buy lodgings for a week at a time, as I suppose you once would. Everything is placed with the certainty of historical reality behind it shops are where they are because it made sense at the time - bakers here, weaponsmiths and blacksmiths there. Kingdom Come hasn't tried to condense a whole world into a game, but instead focused in on a 16 square kilometre area of rural Bohemia, and the dozen or so small villages and towns found there at the time. Instead, it's developer Warhorse's own Czech history brought to life from the year of 1403, and the detail with which it has been recreated is staggering. The RPG offering a first-person medieval simulation like an Elder Scrolls game, with a world living around you, but without the fantasy, magic and monsters. This is the dungeons-and-no-dragons role-playing game sprung from Kickstarter into a full-sized multiplatform release. Kingdom Come is the most believable adventure into medieval history I've ever experienced. But what you see isn't a fantasy world reinforced by a culture's past: it is a culture's past - its bones are made out of it. You feel your feet squelching in muddy, rutted paths, and smell the manure on the fields around you. The sense of time and place it conjures is astonishing. There hasn't been a medieval world this real and substantial since The Witcher 3. Kingdom Come: Deliverance and the history it explores are inseparable.
