So, I slept on this game since release and almost completely ignored it other than wishing Dan and his team all the best. I didn't have a computer that could handle it reasonably, and then when I got one, I completely forgot about this game.
Decided to give it a try now, and other than being happy that I delayed it (seeing it's still buggy even today), I am so sad I missed this before. Because wow, it really is a rough diamond, but mostly diamond. It mostly reminds me of my experience playing Gothic and Gothic 2 as a child, that sense of awe and adventure is completely back. I haven't felt that way for years. It has many similarities actually, from being a non-blank character that you can shape (and sometimes it feels out of place), difficult (at the time) combat, skill trainers, and pretty interesting, memorable characters (some).
I was super scared of it being another Oblivion engine wise but boy was Cryengine the right choice here. The character feels mostly responsive, you can see the arms and legs when you look down, and again other than some jankiness (running down stairs will sometimes result in falling down and grunting, but no health loss fortunately) it does not suffer from the "fridge with a gun" syndrome that a lot of games do when they're first-person. Few other things are rough in the gameplay, like horse controls, targeting / lock-on system, and then some controls (like I don't understand why I have to press X to mount up on my horse instead of E, and E is some stupid comparison screen that you use 4 times in the entire game). But other than that, it feels weighty, hefty, but flows well and keeps you connected to the world. The combat is great in my opinion, hard to understand at first (skills or no skills), but eventually it clicks. I'm not yet at a stage where I could even 1v2 unless I get lucky, but I like the process of learning at more or less the same pace as Henry does.
Graphically, it still looks excellent, I'd say it looks better than the recently released Valhalla, at least in the environment. Characters, stuff like hair and clothes etc, look better in modern games for sure. More importantly, it's very atmospheric, but not artificially so. It's been mentioned here before, but it completely dodges the theme park problem, so you don't walk into a ruined town that suddenly has fog in it and the screen goes grayscale - it's a ruined town and it's black and gray because it burned down, not because the game decides to alter the color balance and adds fog that wasn't there. If you come there during a cloudless sky weather, at noon, it'll look lot less depressive than at night during heavy rain. But it will not alter itself to make you think it's bleak. The visual storytelling doesn't seem to rely on too many clutches, other than the pre-determined scenarios which ask for rain or bleakness but again those are done by the weather and time of day, and you can have the same atmosphere by coming later during the same conditions.
All that said, it doesn't run very well even on pretty good hardware, but I still get 50-60 FPS on high/very high, only in the bigger battles I have to turn it down a bit because the combat depends on FPS quite a bit.
Soundwise I'm OK with the ambient sounds, nature and towns sound great. Music is completely forgettable. English VO is just OK, there's again some bad moments and Sir Hanush' voice actor is just off the charts ridiculous sounding, but then he's based on Vavra, so maybe that's intended.
I'm not too far into the story (just finished Viper's nest yesterday) but so far it's intriguing, very well follows Henry's advancement (though I think it could slow down a bit, I turned into what is essentially Radek's right-hand-man way too quickly) and like I said, I enjoy the characters. I feel a lot of the reactivity that the quests and story has is being overlooked, and then even if you look at the first layer of C&C then a second one might be missed. The handholding C&C is not that good (like sabotaging the bandit/Cuman camp) but the emergent choices are excellent. I love how some of the detective quests can be solved with 3 interviews and a bit of luck (or hard work if you decide to check all 3 suggested locations), or you can do 6 interviews and a miniquest and then get the final location straight away. So a dilligent detective who interrogates all the witnesses etc. gets rewarded with an easier way through the rest of the "case". Also, the simple act of waiting/sleeping changes so much about the game and how you can approach combat or stealing or infiltration. In the Hans Capon rescue, if you don't have a horse and don't go into combat automatically, you end up finding the camp and can run in and try to beat the two Cumans, or you can wait until night, kill them sneakily, or just rescue Hans while they're asleep, or poison their food, come back in the morning and see them go down poisoned and THEN rescue Hans... etc. Hell, I haven't tried, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could run back to the castle, ask for help and lead a bunch of soldiers back to the location to rescue him... eh, maybe the quest just fails if you go too far, but there are hints of great reactivity like that.
In fact in several quests you can either go at it alone or go back and ask for backup. And the backup part isn't even suggested by the game, sometimes.
This is the sort of thing that I can only remember happening in the original Deus Ex, where the developers counted on the player "misbehaving" and programmed the game to respond in a certain way, or didn't even expect it but the game is so system-based that it finds a solution by itself. It's not the new Hitman, where you have 40 options, but all of them have been scripted and are sort of suggested or kind of obvious. You're never expecting the game to "break" - it doesn't let you. And KCD isn't great at it (you can't wipe the camp at the beginning out yourself and therefore skip the next mission, which would be great), but it's very good and the best among any other RPG I can think of.
Also, is it just me or does this game have the best-written flirting/romance relationships? As bland as Henry sometimes might be, I feel like the chemistry between both him and Stephanie, AND him and Theresa, are great, natural, kind of cute, more or less realistic. In fact it's the only tolerable romance I have ever seen in an RPG and especially the fact that it's very much optional (or it seems so, so far anyway) makes me surprised that I engage in it and actually look forward to the dates with Theresa. Normally in any other game I skip the romances if they are completely optional.
All in all, I am extremely surprised by this game, in terms of my own enjoyment and how much "into it" I am (thinking about it even when not playing, actively harassing my friends to try it etc), it's on par with Wasteland 3 and maybe, maybe even slightly better. I'll have to see once I finish it because I've heard not so positive things about the game conclusion. Either way, I'm already in the camp of others who are looking towards a more polished sequel. I'll be fine if it's more of the same just with even more systems, more responsivity and better performance.
I know this review is pointless since everyone's probably already played it, but I really needed to get my thoughts down.
