The first GOTY 2025 contender has emerged: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2

We’re barely out of January, and many of the awards ceremonies for 2024 games have yet to take place. But we already have a solid contender for Game of the Year 2025: Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

The medieval role-playing game from Czech developer Warhorse Studios is solidly planted within a favored genre for the category, and it’s boasting very strong review scores. The gritty epic is the first 2025 release to tick all the boxes that would typically qualify it for success at The Game Awards in December 2025.

To be clear: We at Polygon have no opinion yet on this game’s quality. For some reason, a review copy was withheld from us until the game’s launch on Feb. 4, so we’re only in the early stages of exploring Warhorse’s sequel to its 2018 RPG.

But, as we discovered when we launched our GOTY Watch column last year, there are strong precedents that determine what makes a Game of the Year winner at The Game Awards and in the general public conversation. Story-driven action-adventure games and RPGs with high production values always fare well, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 fits that bill nicely.

Also, a high Metacritic rating is a prerequisite. The Game Awards voting jury is essentially a global critics’ jury, composed of a broad selection of games media outlets from around the world. That’s how sites like Metacritic and OpenCritic work, too, aggregating scores from hundreds of outlets. TGA results are also influenced by fan voting to a small extent — 10%, to be precise — but games typically don’t get into the GOTY category unless they have a Metascore in the high 80s or, even better, the 90s.

A few days out from the review embargo, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 sits at an impressive 88 on Metacritic and 89 on OpenCritic, and at the top of Metacritic’s list of the best games of the year to date. This isn’t enough to guarantee it a nomination, and much will depend on the quality of games released throughout the rest of this year. Some years, no games with sub-90 scores reach the final six nominees for Game of the Year. But a high-80s score combined with a perfect genre profile and strong public support puts the game in a good place. In 2024, Black Myth: Wukong surprised by scoring a nomination off the back of a notably soft 81 Metascore.

That game is an interesting point of comparison for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Like Wukong — and, arguably, like previous GOTY winners The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Baldur’s Gate 3 — Deliverance 2 is a traditional blockbuster game from a nontraditional source. It’s made by a hungry, independent-minded studio that isn’t from the U.S. or Japan, and it has excited fans with both the purity of its vision and the scale of its ambition. The Game Awards’ international jury seems to respond well to “outsider AAA” studios like this — and other awards bodies seem to as well, if Wukong’s continued strong performance in nominations for the upcoming DICE Awards and Game Developers Choice Awards is anything to go by. It doesn’t necessarily hurt that Warhorse creative director Daniel Vávra has been politically controversial — that’s true of Black Myth developer Game Science, too.

Still, it’s very early days. Where will Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s competition come from? Not from Civilization 7, sadly — that game’s 81 Metascore, combined with its less-favored strategy genre, comprehensively sink its chances for GOTY. It’s worth remembering, though, that the much-loved Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is technically eligible for the 2025 Game Awards, after missing the release deadline for the 2024 show by 17 days. That’s about it for games that have already been reviewed by critics, although the next few weeks and months will bring some more likely contenders in the form of Avowed, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Beyond the first quarter of 2025 lie the likes of Death Stranding 2, Hades 2, and Ghost of Yōtei, not to mention the monolithic Grand Theft Auto 6 — if it makes its fall 2025 release window.

For now, though, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is at the front of a field of one. It’s a long time until December, and Warhorse’s game faces a mighty struggle to stay at the front of voters’ minds for 10 months, but it might just have the grit to do it.