Introduction

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II has landed almost exactly seven years after the original game. Henry of Skalitz is now a knight and has gathered tons of experience as a personal bodyguard of Hans Capon of Rattay. But due to an unfortunate turn of events in the spirit of Metroid games, he will be stripped of his armor, personal possessions, and skills, left to return to his former glory on his own in the new open world map Kingdom Come: Deliverance II takes place in.

The game is a massive improvement over the original, bringing streamlined but quite demanding and somewhat janky swordplay that still works, in our opinion, better on a controller. Tons of new quests, and even more choices await the player. Visuals have also been extensively overhauled. Another piece of good news is that the sequel is in a much better place, performance-wise, than the first game was at launch.



The digital recreation of 15th-century Bohemia was built using CryEngine, with Warhorse Studios deciding to avoid implementing demanding ray tracing effects. Despite this, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II looks mostly fantastic with only a few visual effects, such as reflections and ambient occlusion, being noticeably below what you can achieve with ray tracing. On the other hand, while detailed, character models look stiff and lack good animations. Lastly, settlements are less impressive than forests and open meadows but still look more than decent.

The game supports FSR and DLSS (you can force enable-DLSS 4 upscaling inside the NVIDIA app), but there's no support for frame generation.

This handheld performance review will evaluate the performance of Kingdom Come: Deliverance II on the two most popular handheld gaming PCs at the moment, Steam Deck, and ASUS ROG Ally. The following pages also include our thoughts on the out-of-box experience on SteamOS and Windows, optimized settings for both devices, and a ton of screenshots.