Humble Monthly got Kingdom Come this month. Currently trying it out. I'm still in the prologue but so far it seems very solid. The writing really is great and they absolutely nailed the medieval feel in both design and atmosphere. Graphics are pretty good but could be slightly better. Performance on my 1080 at 1440p on very high settings is around 60fps. There are weird dips in cutscenes below 30fps that cause the sound to go out of sync and is quite annoying. The cutscenes are really great, so it hurts double.
Gameplay wise it's standard fare. Melee seems refined and responsive for the most part but I hope I won't have to use it much, since I'm going for a stealthy archer build. There are plenty of skill perks, maybe too many. Having perks that buff a certain aspect but debuff another is a neat thing and adds to the realism.
There are 2 big things that are just terrible game design.
1. You still need a special item to be able to save anywhere. This doesn't really add much to the game and is simply just annoying. A game where you can basically die at random should let you save at any point. Definitely gonna mod that once I get to the open world portion.
2. They use the shitty level system from Elder Scrolls, learning by doing. While this is supposed to add to the realism since it works much like real life it's terrible in execution. It forces the player to cheese the system and as a result the player will behave entirely unrealistic. For example run and jump around to increase vitality, killing farm animals to increase hunting skills, look for random fights to increase melee skills etc. It just feels bad. I will have to hope that the game is engaging enough for me to overlook this.
Still, so far it's better than I expected. Apart from the stupid game design choices it very much feels like a polished Gothic.
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