I literally just completed this game and I must say it’s one of the best gaming experiences I might have had in the past ten years in terms of a western rpg that wasn’t Elite Dangerous.

It’s really weird because this game pretty much snuck up on me, I saw a few trailers with no gameplay and I was like meh. Then I dunno, it just hit with the scope and the combat and the whole world that this was a milestone and I said to myself I would never preorder a game again after evil within but I broke that vow for this and I can’t say I regret it.

Straight out of the gate it’s more skyrim than skyrim, it’s more witcher than witcher it has just a sprinkling of thief and it’s historically accurate.

The first thing that really struck me though were the characters and the pacing. The intro really takes its time to ease you into the world and the characters and the story. So that when it all goes to hell I actually, now brace yourselves; gave a flying fuck about the characters.

Like imagine playing fallout 4 but you actually care about your wife you spent literally five minutes with being murdered and your baby stolen. When the shit started flying I actually felt kind of emotional, it grabbed me by the feels in a way a game really shouldn’t be able to and it had me gripped from the word go.

One of the things I gripe about constantly is games not taking the time to set up their worlds or their characters and just dumping us into combat for the sake of keeping people with low attention spans engaged. This game does not pander to these people, and it can be upwards of six hours til you’re into the game proper. I don’t think I left the starting town for at least a week because I was having too much fun thieving and messing around.

It does what fallout tried and failed to do. And now I see why it failed to do those things because it didn’t go hard enough on the rpg elements, if you want a voiced protagonist with a family, you have to go all out and just have the character as a defined person. Kcd just nails, you’re Henry a blacksmiths son from Skallitz, boom, the rest is up to you.

So it’s less about who you are and more about who you become throughout the game and I loved Henry and I loved his interactions and friendships and romances and all the characters are perfect, three dimensional people.

Like I kept thinking about Skyrim and how every character is essentially a parody, they’re just cardboard cutouts walking around spouting inane dialogue and they’re just jokes, they’re walking one liners, they’re not real people. The people in this game feel real. They feel like they have this whole internal world.

The game takes itself seriously but still manages to be fun and sometimes funny and lighthearted, like real life it takes the ups and the downs and it balances them perfectly.

The feel and world are just perfect, nailed.

Combat is amazing, as a former fencer I can say it’s the first game with a parry/reposte and a feinting system, it just blew my mind, it makes skyrims combat look retarded in scope. And it’s always fun, I relish getting into fights that feel more like bladed games of chess than hack and slash button mashing.

The leveling system is great and it does away with the nonsense skill trees like skyrim or the number bullshit from fallout. You just level up skill as you use them unlocking new techniques and perks and you get stronger and faster as train but your health never raises. You get more fit but you can’t grow a second heart and you can’t heal in combat not to mention your saves are limited so all put together the game is just insanely intense and if you pick a fight with two or more people you’re toast.

The game forces you to think and to plan and to strategise your enemies and I found myself waiting til night fall to strike bandit camps under the cover of night and kill them in their sleep or poison their food. I’d take out their sentries with arrows and then stab their camp leader in the heart while he slept.

It’s just such an immersive world.

I really could go on about this game forever so I’ll just go over a few minor gripes and then go over the inevitable controversy surrounding this game.

Now these gripes are so minor they really need not mention but I’ll mention them anyway, it’s buggy as shit haha. It really can’t be helped, they’re a first time publisher and they were rushed by the fans but this game is bugged to shit but that’s all the more reason for me to come back and replay it in a few months for my second playthrough and have it run smoother.

The ending isn’t so much an ending as it felt like the developer was saying “ok that’s enough game for you”.

I mean honestly it was fine, the game is plenty long enough to be worth the forty quid price tag by todays standards and they’re basically an indie developer who crowdfunded this game which I’m glad to say is selling incredibly well beating out even bethesda with their dismal new wolfenstein game.

But I just think the ending was a bit anticlimatic, it really wasn’t even an ending except maybe in the sense of an episode to a tv show and I feel like if this was ten years ago this game would have just been twice as long for the same price.

I think we’ve had our standards gradually lowered over the years by these big game publishers we overlook the fact games used to be much longer, they used to be these huge events and now they’re parcelled out to us in small chunks to make the developer more money in the form of dlc.

What is dlc except taking a part out of a game then to sell the game at full price and charge you extra for the bit they took away? It’s basically fucking theft, I mean come on.

Like this game has the goal *spoilers* avenging your father and getting your sword back and it ends with you doing neither of those things, like wtf? I mean where is the rest of my fucking game?

*spoilers end*

I’m not really complaining because the games length is perfect and it feels cinematic and engaging and above all realistic but I still feel a little cheated.

But I feel a great hope, this is Warhorse’s first game and it was crowdfunded and it’s still better than anything a triple A game developer is doing. This game with the fraction of the budget and experience is making ubisoft and bethesda look like amateurs in comparison. It makes a mockery of them.

And although I did like the witcher I really think a lot of it really over hyped, it’s good but I always felt like I needed to play the previous games and read the books (which I’m doing now) to enjoy the witcher 3 and even then I can’t really see myself giving a shit whether geralt ends up with triss or yennifer because I thought they were both sort of obnoxious haha. That being said I’m loving the books and I have the second game, just haven’t started playing it yet.

Now onto the fun shit, controversy haha.

Ok so if you haven’t been living in a cave you’re well aware that the gaming industry is pretty much infest with sjw I dunno how you would describe them, hipster cultists busy bodies who don’t play games unless they’re about depression and are 8bit or ironic in some way and the developer is a lesbian herbivore trans-triceritops with adhd.

You know the sort, the virtue signalling race huxtors, the shekel grubbing gender benders screaming oppression as they hear the coin purse shaking.

Yeah so they really tried (and failed) to burn this game, and burn it hard, why you may ask?

Because there are no blacks or gays or sheboys or whatevers in it. I know right, now black people in 15th century Czechoslovakia, it’s downright shocking that there would be no black people in a game set before africa was even on a map. And the witcher got the same shit for this, because that game is about polish folklore written before they even knew black people existed.

But you know there are people out there, you know who they are the ‘we waz kangz’ folks who think black people were these magical time travellers with space ships who ruled egypt and created white people but then were enslaved by white people and somehow black people were everywhere even in victorian england as soldiers and they were achilles and joan of arc and friar tuck, they waz everybody essentially.

But I think the thing that triggers these people the most though and it’s the most telling is just one word.

God.

I dunno, I found it really refreshing the first time I heard people talking about God and Jesus in this game and it made me realise that this was the real world. And they weren’t talking about Talos or mentioning god in an ironic hipster way as if they knew it was a joke. But instead talking about God as if they were devout believers and shock horror even the main character is christian.

There’s no option to be a polykin toast sexual demi-girl agnostiskepchick, you are forced to be a hetrosexual white male christian and this is rustling jimmies from here to california.

This game and this developer is not here to cuck to you, they’re not here to pander to your fucking bullshit. They’re not going to bend their narrative just so you can tickle your pickle playing a black female lesbian knight in medieval bohemia or a black female nazi a la cod haha.

They don’t don’t give a shit about your feelings, all they care about is making a great and historically accurate game and that is exactly what they’ve done and will continue to do and there’s nothing you can do to stop them because their sales are through the fucking roof.

oppression

Fucking hell, almost 2k words on this, I need a fucking life.