I'd say that this is one of the most authentic medieval games I've ever seen. If you liked Mount & Blade for its setting and its depiction of combat, KCD mixes that in with an open-world RPG to create a game that has technically accurate combat and a modest but engaging story. It's clear that the developers have put a lot of love and passion into the game, and that support is likely to continue.

What lets the game down is its crippling bugs. Numerous quests are fatally glitched, sometimes resulting in hours of lost play time. Some quests don't trigger key events, forcing the player to leave the quest unfinished or take drastic shortcuts. For example, one main story quest involves infiltrating a monastery, but the NPCs that were required to initiate the quest were glitched, being unresponsive and stuck in a room. I had no way to bypass the main quest, so I ended up slaughtering the entire monastery to kill the one guy that I was meant to, effectively skipping an ENTIRE quest (and apparently the most tedious one, so that was a blessing).

It gets worse as the game progresses. The deeper you go, the more the frustration builds up. The limited saves, the laggy loading times, the uncertainty of the game deciding to load or not. While the devs have been working hard on patches, the 1.3.1 update added more broken game elements, such as the game putting you into fights before the load screen disappears, effectively getting you killed before you get in.

In my play through, I had somehow done something that triggered a universal manhunt for me in every village. It nearly made the main storyline unfinishable as all the NPCs would actually fight me, preventing me from continuing. It's broken system after broken system, quest after quest. I ended up rushing through the remainder of the game, leaving out all the unfinished side quests, because the game world had literally turned against me and put me into an irrecoverable situation after 100 hours of gameplay.

And despite all this, it's STILL a beautiful game. It leaves you wishing that the devs fixed these critical bugs ASAP so that more people don't go through the same frustration.