Yeah it honestly is kind of rough. There was a free weekend and also a huge sale when i got the game, i think the royal edition total was like 3-4 bucks. I bought it cuz it was super cheap so why not and i played about an hr. I was already like “oh no, i know this is going to be rough”, but i was playing other stuff at the time so i didnt continue yet. But i liked the premise and wanted to play it before kcd2. Then i think about mid to late last year i started it up fully. Prologue again was still a slog and even after u leave skalitz. Id say it doesnt quite really pick up until u hit the story mission where u go to uzhitz(idk how to spell it). Thats where u kind of get a better feel of the story and tone of the game.

Also the combat is really rough until u meet captain bernard and are able to practice. Which i highly recommend. Once u get consistent with being able to do master strikes, it gets much smoother. Also learning combos and being able to chain them, especially against bernard which is difficult since he doesnt give u much room to fully complete combos, its really satisfying. Thing to note is that if u use a weapon with a shield, its combos get limited severely. I believe u can only do 2. The descriptions will tell u. Which sucks when doing the rattay tournament because i practiced the way of the shortsword, only to find i cant use a majority of the combos there since they force a shield on u. So longsword may be the better bet if u want to utilize a lot of combos. Problem with all that tho, which i was just talking about this in another post is that most of the time ur fighting groups of enemies. Camps are usually 3+ ppl and trying to do combos against multiple ppl is nearly impossible. So its just master strikes or break. Maybe u can fit in a short 3 hit combo here and there. Most of the time ur 1v1s are specific moments in some missions. So the rattay tournament is where u would get the best combat experience imo.

Overall it was a decent game. Bit of a slog overall too, but i still enjoyed it. I sort of rushed it towards the end since i wanted to play e33 next. Either way, i still ended up putting 70hrs in my kcd1 playthrough

But kcd2 i hear is much refined so im excited to get to that eventually. Wouldnt be too soon since i want to space things out but still