The first Kingdom Come was a fascinating mess: a studio with more ambition than budget trying to simulate medieval Bohemia down to the way bread goes stale, wrapped around combat that most people bounced off within the first hour. Six years and a much bigger budget later, Warhorse has made the game the original was always trying to be. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is not a soft reboot or a course correction toward something more accessible. It’s the same uncompromising vision, executed with the resources and polish it always deserved, and it’s one of the best RPGs to come out in years for exactly the people willing to meet it on its own terms.

That last part matters, and I’d rather say it upfront than bury it in a caveats section at the end. This is not a game for someone who wants a smooth, forgiving power fantasy. Henry starts weak, stays vulnerable for longer than most RPGs would dare, and the game expects you to read, plan, and occasionally fail rather than steamroll your way through. If that sounds like a strength to you, keep reading. If it sounds exhausting, this review’s high score isn’t going to change how the game actually plays.

The best-simulated world in the genre right now

Warhorse’s pitch has always been immersive-sim-meets-RPG rather than action-RPG-with-some-systems, and Deliverance II is where that finally clicks into place. NPCs run their own daily routines whether Henry is watching or not, quests routinely have three or four workable solutions instead of a dialogue-wheel illusion of choice, and the amount of care put into 15th-century Bohemia, from the way the church operates to how a blacksmith actually forges a blade, gives the world a texture that scripted “authenticity” in other RPGs never quite reaches. The cinematic direction is a genuine step up from the first game too: some of the best cutscene staging in the genre, paired with quest writing that gives you real, often morally uncomfortable choices rather than an obvious good and bad option.

Character writing benefits from the bigger budget in ways that show. The cast is more varied and better performed than in the first game, and the main story, while long enough that some reviewers fairly call it overlong, earns its length more often than it wastes it. This is a studio that clearly used six extra years of development to fix the parts of the original that were held together with good intentions, and it shows in almost every scene.

Combat and systems: better, still an acquired taste

Warhorse smoothed out a lot of the original’s rough edges: skills are combined more sensibly, outfit loadouts make gearing up less fiddly, and the overall sense of progression feels less punishing for its own sake. But combat is still combat from this studio, which means stamina management, deliberate swordplay, and a learning curve that will frustrate anyone expecting something closer to a Soulslike or a Witcher-style action game. More than one reviewer has called it “claustrophobic” in tight spaces, and that’s fair: this is not the system’s biggest strength even in its improved form, and a few skills, alchemy and drinking among them, still feel more like flavor than something worth investing in.

The bigger structural criticism, and the one I’d weigh most heavily if you’re on the fence, is pacing. Main story missions can funnel you from cutscene to scripted event to cutscene for stretches long enough that the open world you were promised temporarily disappears. It’s a legitimate complaint, and it’s the main reason this doesn’t land as a flawless game. But it’s also a complaint about a game that’s trying to tell a tightly authored story inside an open world, not a game that doesn’t know what it wants to be, and the trade-off mostly pays for itself once you’re back out exploring.

Voice acting is inconsistent: strong for the leads, occasionally flat or oddly emphasized for secondary NPCs in a game with an enormous amount of dialogue to record. The high barrier to entry is real too. Henry starts genuinely weak, and the amount of trial, error, and occasional grinding needed to become competent will put off players used to modern RPGs easing them in. None of this is new for the series, and none of it is a surprise if you played the first game, but it’s worth saying clearly for anyone coming in fresh off the marketing rather than the original.