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It's one of those games who tries to do something great, succeeds in some, fails at others and is paper thin everywhere else. It's a very frustrating game to play, because it tend to vary between the best gaming moments I had in my life and pure rage from tediouness and jank. Thus by its nature it tends to be a very polarizing game and as 'realistic' game it tends to attract the most severe basement dwellers as its fanbase.

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This game sells itself on immersion. It's like playing Skyrim, but larping like you are in a medieval period. This is the main attraction of this game as people want Skyrim, but with more focused structure. Better questing, new setting, better atmosphere and a like. This game tries to deliver it and while it fails at large to do so, it manages to keep a thin veneer of authenticity which dazzles players and make this game immersive. However, a more acute gamer will quickly see questionable historic accuracy, simplistic NPCs AI and myriad of other issues which reminds you that this is just a game and a very simple one at that.
https://youtu.be/5h_5mK7GJXw
Saving in this game is done by sleeping in owned bed, potion or at certain story missions. Sadly, this save system does nothing, but frustrate people, because in practice it results in nothing else, but lost half an hour or longer. Usually dying over some stupid stuff or game jank. Clueless people defend this system by saying that you can power game it. However, if you have to min/max saving system with an expert player knowledge from the start, how good this system is exactly, does it add anything to the mix then? Saving is incredibly frustrating experience for a new player who doesn't know game mechanics in depth and doesn't power game. While to people who do min/max it, saving becomes trivial. Just an extra grind which they do.

As such, saving in this game does nothing, but frustrate majority of players and artificially expand game's length. It doesn't help either that saving tends to be incredibly inconsistent. Some beds save your progress while some at random do not. Quests should save your progress, but they often don't do that. Likewise, they often have an awful tendency to save during the start of a major chat, not before. This means that you have to grind conversation options all over again for xp and quests. Saving is just a giant mess in this game which serves no other purpose than to add tedium and frustration to the game.

If you want to see what mixed bag looks like, there is no finer game than this. Getting drunk with a priest was the best gaming moment in my life. While becoming a monk was the most tedious, boring slog of a quest which I had to restart multiple times and put up 10 hours to complete. A questline which should take you just 2-3 hours. If not for my stalwart dedication to gaming this would had been the moment I would had quitted multiple times, this is just how frustrating and tedious this quest was.

Quests in this game are often problematic as they don't account for ways how a player can complete one. Making non-direct ways obscure and unhinted. For example, I had quest to get a nobleman wine. It was incredibly frustrating quest where I needed to break through highest security doors and went through guard which basically sits in a corridor. It can take hours before you can sneak through and just to get in you need to abuse in-game jank. Likewise, when you enter monestary, you essentially need to have stealth and picklocking skills and play as a rogue. Every quest there involves sneaking and without it, you make everything so much harder for yourself. There are plenty of quests in this game where you are forced to approach situation in a certain way. Like A Night Raid where you are forced to sneak and use unreliable stealth mechanics or it is an instant failure. Another quest is killing Runt on 1 vs 1. This is a quest which also annoys countless players as it locks you in a room with the strongest opponent in a game (probably) and you have to duel him to death. What if my Henry isn't a fighter, but a rogue? Well, you have nothing left, but cheesing game and abusing its jank. Game quests have this tendency of some of them being absolutely awesome and others incredibly frustrating.

There is also an issue with quests in general. Game doesn't allow you to pick and choose quests you want to complete. It pollutes your quest log with quests you don't want to complete and it constantly spams your HUD with notifications that you can complete events. What kind of RPG is this? Likewise, it tends to lure unsuspecting players to their DLC quests. Woman's Lot is one such example where a player is taken away from the experience and is forced to play very tedious questline which can take him several hours at least just because he bothered to give a question to an NPC...

Then there are immersion. Game makes a big deal how you are just blacksmith son and you don't know how to fight. However, you kill like 3 bandits on your way to bury your parents. Henry already had seen more war and fighting than most city guards. However, game often assumes your lack of experience and it creates ludonarrative dissonance. Game quests also tends to emphasize how nobody is willing to trust you and they they casually give you to go solo completing the most important quest in an entire kingdom...Nor calling you a boy stops any of NPC to send you clearing bandit camps full of well armed and armored bandits. Things like that completely break the immersion.

Finally, main questline in game is also just...bad, It is a medieval roleplaying game, but every main quest in this game is about conducting detective work. I don't want to be a detective. I want to be a knight! And how do you think game handles such murder mystery type questing? Exactly, exceptionally poorly. You have to solve a mystery while game actively guides you by your nose by saying where to go next from A to B. It's a joke and game misses the opportunity to indulge player into fantasy of that era. Quests like that are few and far in between and mostly focused at the start of a game. Which might explain why this game trick so many players into believing that it's a better game than it actually is.

Game tries to reach for the stars with a very ambitious combat system, but it falls flat on its face. The problem with combat system is that enemies don't play by the same rules as you do. They don't get tired as you. They can instant block most of your attacks. Combat absolutely sucks for anything more than 1 vs 1 and even then, it is largely a stat fest where a person with highest stats win easily. It's even more lopsided than in MMORPGs since at least there you could do SOME damage to a high level player. In this game you are literally invincible against low level NPCs. Yet, they still are so eager to annoy you and to attack you. It's ridiculous how you are casually fist fighting in a full knight gear against peasants. They can't land even a single point of damage on you. Likewise, bandits get instantly overpowered and killed with high end weapons in a few strikes. However, it still doesn't mean that combat isn't frustrating. High end enemies tend to be in groups and then just constantly rush you. You cannot take one of them without other striking your from your side. This makes combat a very frustrating experience as it really drags out some fights and forces you to jank your opponents out by taking terrain which they don't know how to handle.

Another problem is that game locks camera on enemies. This prevents you from moving or fleeing. It is very sticky and makes your character very hard to control freely. Not to mention that opponents can cheat and force you into animations out of the blue. Like making you to fall down for some reason (probably pressed F to tackle from 3 meters away). Combat in such situations don't get good. Enemies are mindless and they essentially can start chasing your through entire map. I once had to backtrack through entire forest into the village where I finally got backup...

As for fighting itself, it's bad. Combos are weak and pointless. They are very difficult to pull off, because it's hard to precisely make a hit you want. A center thrust can very easily be understood as directional thrust. Even if you do a combo, enemy can just block it anyways. And entire skill tree is like that. It is just combos for your specific weapons which you won't bother memorizing or using anyway. Entire skill tree is similar. A lot of questionable and useless skills with some which break game balance.

In the end, even its premise is poorly executed. This game is as historical as far as buldings and models go. Everything else is just nonsense. For one, this game fails to properly portray villages of that period. Most of them in this game are size of a hamlet. However, they have a very heavy pressence of merchants. This isn't historically accurate. Villages often were a lot bigger than they are portrayed here and merchants weren't just standing in the open. There were bazaars to which they had traveled. Furthermore, they certainly didn't had their own shop in every hamlet with their own personal shop guard. Jeez, I hate those weebs who are saying that this game is somehow historically accurate. It is as historically accurate as a caricature.

Then entire countryside dynamic is non existent. Towns are barren of people. Most notably, game doesn't feature children which exclusion makes it completely unrealistic. What is more, despite that most people in that era were subsistence farmers, in this game there are precious few fields and nobody works in the fields, only in their own gardens. There isn't a single portrayal of three-crop system. Game is little better than throwing bunch of matching assets unto the map and pretending it's realistic. Here is a quick list of flaws:

1. Hund howling.
   
2. Useless skill tree.
   
3. Constant bandit ambushes.
   
4. Unhistorical weapon names.
   
5. Silly in-game economy.
   
6. Very poor vegetation models.
   
7. Poor lighting.
   
8. NPC loading.
   
9. No tavern life.
   
10. No NPC guidance.
    
11. Pointless eating mechanic.
    
12. Free bathing.
    
13. No mounted combat.
    
14. Lack of inventory management.
    
15. Poor hunting.

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Games which I end up reviewing negatively despite being quite fun to play. The problem comes from sheer frustration and lack of common sense from developers. Their lack of experience shines through and every time I start having fun, game pulls me out of the experience and pisses me off. As story focused game, it is timeless. However, it's deeply flawed, paper thin experience which collapses under any sort of scrutiny. Hopefully its sequal will be better in every way!

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