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Kingdom Come Deliverance 2: too hard for me

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Overview

I spent about 60 hours playing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 earlier in 2026. I gave up, though, right about the point where the game is supposed to start getting good. The difficulty curve just wore me out.

There is a great deal to like about KCD2: deep, complex systems; a realistic skill development tree; some manageable difficulty in the form of gear wear mechanics; a deep story and a vast, realistic medieval setting to explore. I’m sure I would have really enjoyed completing the game If I could get past the combat difficulty.

I’m not giving KCD2 a score because, despite 60 hours or so of play time, I never made it past the first quarter or so of the game. I sometimes give scores to larger games before full completion but, in this case, I don’t think doing so would be fair.

TitleKingdom Come: Deliverance 2
DeveloperWarhorse Studios
TypeRPG
Platform(s)Playstation 5; Xbox Series X / S, Windows; Reviewed on Xbox Series X
Kelly Score ™<< incomplete; no score >>

Deep systems, lots going on

Skills in Kingdom Come Deliverance are learned through doing: swing a sword and you get good at sword swinging, sneak and you get good at concealment, craft a potion and you get good at alchemy. I found their take on this kind of progress to be well done and generally enjoyable for all tasks that were ‘optional’. I’ll delve into the non-optional tasks and how that doesn’t work so well in the next section.

Armour and weapons degrade through use, and must be repaired. Repairing gear requires skill, materials, and money in some combination. The rate at which equipment falls apart can be a bit overwhelming at times, and having both a sword and your armour wear out mid-combat can be pretty frustrating. Skilled dodging and blocking can mitigate this but, as I’ll touch on in the next section, getting those skills is aggravating. This is especially true given that money is scarce and many skills- especially combat- require significant amounts to practice.

NPCs are close enough to ‘real’ to be convincing without being too frustrating. They have schedules for their day: breakfast at the pub, office at around 10:00 am, pub again in the evening, bed when it gets dark. But they also communicate in a sense: Guards looking for you will share where they last saw you, and I believe ordinary citizens will also assist in a search by telling the guards where to look.

The story and setting of Kingdom Come Deliverance is arguably the thing that most drew me in. A vast series of territories to explore set in a reasonably accurate rendering of medieval Bohemia attracts the explorer in me. Story materials, written documents, and conversation with NPCs build a world that feels worth all of that exploring. And the character’s own story is one I had hoped to navigate through to some kind of completion.

Bouncing off the combat difficulty

The breaking point for me was combat. Combat is fundamentally unavoidable: at some point you have to fight, and you have to fight well. Combat also rather uniquely combines game-system skills (the ones the game character develops) with player timing and reaction skills.

Developing skills (the abilities of your character) costs money as every fight degrades armour and weapons leading to expensive repairs. This is compounded by any shortcoming in the player’s (my) skills. Timing is critical for most combat actions both offensive and defensive- if I had excellent timing I could block and parry consistently as well as defeat my foes quickly. Without player skills, weapons and armour degrade from mis-timed blocks and slower enemy defeats.

I couldn’t get out of the hole my own lack of player skills dug for me. KCD2 became incredibly frustrating around about the time that I was at the Nomad’s camp learning combat skills. It was sad as I understand that the world ‘opens up’ after that section and the story beats that follow get more interesting. But they also involve more and more combat.

I paused and looked for quests I hadn’t completed yet. I will use one as an example: rescuing my dog, Mutt. I dug into the quest looking at guides and every path to Mutt involved combat against at least two opponents at once. Combat becoming more common makes sense to me, but I also knew two on one with me being the one was just a recipe for death.

Combat is the one skill you must develop because fighting is fundamentally unavoidable in the game. It is also the singular skill that demands both character skill and player skill at a certain level in order to succeed. And with so little money in the game, getting gear repaired between the necessary combat encounters required to increase either skill seemed more like a chore than fun.

Conclusion

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is an excellent game. But it pays to be aware of what kind of game it is before going into it. If you enjoy RPGs with complex systems and like being challenged to develop both your character and your own skills, then KCD2 will be a good match for you. If, like me, you like the complex systems but don’t like the focus on skill tests, then maybe look elsewhere.

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