Had the day off work so I played this most of the morning. Time for the hot take (TM).
Combat isn't bad, though the learning curve is actually more the character's learning curve than the player's. At the start, combat is fairly clunky - you only know a few moves and most of your opponents only know a few moves so a lot of the time it feels like you're kinda mashing buttons hoping to get the right outcome. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, however, because having smooth, easily-controllable combat from the very beginning would defy the character. Henry is a peasant who only first ever picked up a sword yesterday, when he first starts fighting with it he should be shit, and the only way he should be able to win is that his opponents also don't know what they're doing. After you get some more experience and better training and have the ability to do more things in combat it starts to get pretty fun and much smoother to control. But even at the start it's way better than the left-click spam of nu Elder Scrolls or the fast attack/dodge/repeat Witcher 3. Although the fact that early enemies take a million hits to down can be annoying. I think I get what they were going at - an early cutscene has Henry swinging at a stake in the ground with his sword and just nicking it because he doesn't know what the hell he's doing, so I think the implication early on is that your hits aren't solid, clean hits and so they aren't really enough to take down a man. But it feels Morrowindy to hit a guy with what looks like a blow that should cleave him in the shoulder and it having little visible impact. Still, overall I'm enjoying the combat.
As far as the story...well I'm a big fan of using the medium to tell the story and KC:D definitely doesn't do that. However, if you're gonna make your video game story dependent on cutscenes, this is the way to do it. The cutscenes are well done, with good writing and acting. Probably the highlight scene so far was the Hungarian army showing up. In terms of normal dialogues the writing remains pretty good, I just have two small problems. The first is the loading screens before dialogues. The vast majority of them are so quick as to be unnoticeable, however there have been several where it's a 5-10 second wait, which is kind of ridiculous. Still, there haven't been that many of those so it's not that big an issue. The second thing is that the lip synching ranges from excellent to hot garbage. I don't really care personally but if you hate jank, this might make you mad. The animations are OK, but the characters do have that thousand-yard-stare. We know that already though.
Historical accuracy seems pretty good. My immershun is well-kept most of the time, though the alchemy system is a little ridiculous (didn't know they had see-in-the-dark potions in the early 15th century). Also the combat, as mentioned above, sometimes stretches the suspension of disbelief, though I feel like it will get better once the opponents are better trained and armored. Lastly the one city I've been to (Rattay) definitely feels like there should be more people out and about, but it isn't too bad.
Game looks beautiful and I'm playing on low settings. Even with mediocre draw distance and low textures the world looks plush and green, and certain indoor places, like churches, really have a great atmosphere. My main complaint here is that SLI isn't working, because I'd like to see what it looks like on medium-high
. On low settings with a GTX 670 I'm getting 40-50 FPS though so it's definitely playable. My main complaint at lower settings is that the faces occasionally and really obvious artifacts on them.
The character system is alright, but not great. Your attributes level up by using them, and every certain number of levels in an attribute you get to pick a perk. The problem is that it seems to generally be a choice between two useless abilities or one useless and one good ability, so I'm not sure how much character building the perk system actually adds.
They really hyped up the whole multiple ways to solve things aspect, and from what I've seen it's mostly true. You can usually use combat or diplomancy for most things, and many also offer stealth solutions. The diplomacy is decent too, it's not a simple mindless choose-your-best-persuasion-ability option because oftentimes, the ability you're the most skilled in is not the appropriate thing to be using for the situation. I've gone through most of the game with my intimidate as my highest persuasion skill but a lot of the time it actually works better to try to use one of the other skills and this always feels like it makes sense for the specific situation. Stealth meanwhile, seems fairly advanced for a game like this. It's no Thief, but both lighting and sound matter, and you can make yourself more stealthy by changing your outfit. My big complaint with stealth is the lockpicking minigame (which are almost always terrible of course). Maybe it's just that I need to lower the sensitivity on my mouse, but I find it exceptionally difficult to pick even easy locks right the first time, and if you break a lockpick even once it's basically an alarm to all nearby NPCs. Since early game stealth (with the exception of sneaking around potential enemies) almost always end with lockpicking, I've mostly been avoiding it.
The save system is mostly incline, since it really forces you to deal with the consequences of failure (although I haven't seen a ton of C&C so far, I do have hopes in the future as I've just gotten to the less-linear part of the game). I would like a save-on-exit system though for if I need to quit suddenly for whatever reason.
I know most reviewers early have said the game is bug-ridden, but I honestly have run into almost no bugs. Must just be lucky I guess, or people are making a bigger deal of it than it actually is.
Overall early rating is
. I am quite happy with my day 1 purchase.
