Conclusion

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 builds upon its predecessor with an engaging medieval saga, refined melee combat, and a vast, immersive world. The game continues Henry's story, a blacksmith's son caught in dynastic conflicts, delivering a compelling mix of historical authenticity and cinematic storytelling. The city of Kuttenberg, which you unfortunately reach only very late in the game, stands out as a highlight, offering a stunningly detailed medieval environment filled with diverse quests, from political intrigue to dark mysteries. The game's 100+ side quests are engaging, and it helps that your tasks feel meaningful rather than repetitive. While the RPG elements shine, sometimes there are conflicts between the open-world exploration and linear storytelling.

The game offers good combat, role-playing depth, and a well-designed world. The revamped perk system, improved archery mechanics, and intuitive alchemy enhance gameplay variety. Generally, crafting is much more involved than just pressing a craft button, which can be hit or miss, depending on whether you want a lighter RPG experience of prefer more immersion. What I REALLY hate is that auto-saves happen very rarely, and you'll often lose like an hour of progress, especially when exploring. Manual saves are hidden behind a limited resource. To me this feels like a +playtime mechanism, nothing else. Cheat Engine to the rescue. While there's a fast-travel option that works well, I also used speed hacks from time to time to speed up things that seemed intentionally sluggish. I like that you can skip dialogue line-by-line, which is great if you're a fast-reading RPG veteran.

Overall, the game isn't a Witcher 3, but it's not that far behind. I can definitely recommend it to lovers of the RPG genre, but be patient, it takes quite a while for the story and everything to unfold—the first few hours is more like a tutorial.

Graphics
Graphics are "good," not spectacular in any way. The choice for CryEngine is definitely noticeable when it comes to character animations and faces—these look quite stiff and not remotely close to what we've seen in modern Unreal Engine 5 games. Outdoor environments are well-designed, with great-looking foliage and vegetation. Once you go near settlements, the visual quality definitely drops though. Here older games like Witcher 3 don't look much worse than Kingdom Come Deliverance II. Especially for an RPG graphics aren't the most important thing though. The real-time rendered cutscenes are of much higher quality, but here, too, the stiff character models are a bit distracting.

Shader Stutter and Accessibility
KCD 2 doesn't use Unreal Engine, which means shader compilation and stutter is a complete non-issue. There is no "compiling shaders" screen on startup, the game loads within 15 seconds or so. It does compile and cache shaders in the filesystem, but in an extremely seamless way. Dear Epic, this is how it should be done in Unreal Engine, too.

There isn't much in terms of accessibility—nothing for colorblind or otherwise impaired people. There's no way to adjust difficulty or fine-tune mechanics. Here the limited budget vs big publishers definitely shows. There is no DRM, which is a welcome change—you can actually own your game.

Upscaling & Ray Tracing
It's been a while since I've played a CryEngine game, but it seems they worked hard to catch up. You get support for NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR upscaling, but there is no support for Frame Generation. Also, there is no support for ray tracing, just an "experimental" profile, which really just ups the settings, but doesn't enable RT or any other next-gen rendering techniques.

Hardware Requirements
Hardware requirements are very manageable, even at ultra settings. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p without no upscaling, you only need a GeForce RTX 3060 or Radeon RX 7600. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RTX 4060 Ti, Radeon RX 6800 or RX 7700 XT. 4K60? Radeon RX 7900 XTX is the only AMD card reaching that target, and RTX 4080 and faster. By popular request we're testing upscaling now, which definitely helps, now 1440p cards can play at fluid 4K.

VRAM
Our testing shows that VRAM usage appears quite high, but that's mostly because the engine keeps everything in memory to fill up available VRAM—which isn't going to happen with the 32 GB RTX 5090. Our performance results clearly show that an 8 GB card is sufficient, even at 4K Ultra without upscaling (RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB vs 16 GB). There is always some amount of pop-in, both on geometry and textures, even if you have plenty of VRAM, it's just the way the developers tuned their settings.