Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

Pathfinder: Kingmaker lets you you play as the ruler of your own kingdom, expanding it every chapter and solving/fighting the various threats your kingdom encounters. For the most part this means visiting lots of areas and dungeons with your party, doing quests and fighting enemies. Another part consists of managing your kingdom as a ruler and building settlements - this is basically a minigame within the game. I agree with a lot of people that the kingdom management part isn't really engaging, but you can just set the difficulty of it to effortless or easy. The best part of the game is the combat. You can play real time with pause, or turn based. I advise everyone new to the game to start with turn based combat, as it really lets you understand what the different skills and spells do. When you reach a higher level, you can always switch to real time combat. The story and companions were okay in my opinion, but not as good as Baldur's Gate 2 or Divinity Original Sin 2. The only real downside to this game is the steep learning curve. If you're not familiar with the pen and paper version of Pathfinder, prepare to look up a lot of things on the internet. I used a build guide myself. Conclusion: Pathinder: Kingmaker is basically the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate. If you like those games, you owe it to yourself to play this game.

It provides 100 hour long play-through but less than half of that is actually enjoyable. Game suffers greatly from poor game-design decisions that love to waste your time. I really wanted to like it, but it's just not happening. Let's hope the developers learn their lessons and will cut out the tedious mechanics in future titles.

Ok folks, after enough hours spent playing this game to make me wonder about the priorities in my life I can honestly say that I'm a big fan of this game. As of March of 2022, I have not seen any of the bugs people have run into since release. Therefore you can relax as far as that goes. If you like party based CRPGs, like fantasy settings, and are willing to put in the time to learn the rules that govern the game, then this is a rewarding experience. The story isn't mind blowing, but it's interesting enough to keep you interested even during replays. The inter-party dialog is "bantery" and at times genuinely amusing. There is a huge variety of races and classes so you won't have any problems finding a playstyle that suits you. Personally I'm a fan of reducing your enemies into a fine red mist up close and personal like, but if you prefer spell casters, healer/support, or sneaky/stabby types then there are plenty of options. Here's a tip for first time players: use turn-based combat mode until you understand the underlying mechanics of combat. It makes learning the intricacies of the game mechanics MUCH easier. Most classes are fairly easy to figure out, but some have abilities that are easier to understand when you see how each action/spell/ability fits with the action economy (at least I found that to be true, but I could just be an idiot). If you are a fan of Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and games like that then Kingmaker will be a rewarding experience for you. Besides, supporting small game studios really helps the gaming industry as a whole and provides more options for people like me who dislike most of the games the big (not to mention corrupt, greedy, and over-hyped) studios are cranking out. Kingmaker was clearly not made in a cookie-cutter fashion and is obviously a passion project for the devs instead of just a job.

Both halves of the game - classic Baldur's Gate-esque DnD, and the kingdom management sim sound great on paper, but get entirely crippled by one or two awful design decision that ruin everything that makes them fun. I'll start with the party DnD because it's significantly better: The critically bad decision was to make the DnD part a resource management situation due to the retsing mechanic using up heavily limited resources and time. That means you can never use your powerful party to their full extent against proper brutal enemy encounters. Instead, you're managing every spell cast and hoping you'll last until the end of the current dungeon. That also makes it that no encounters are particularly challenging unless you bastardize the difficulty sliders, and you're just fighting numerous encounters of the same mid-tier, unremarkable slush. And the kingdom management is straight up one star, a massive ball and chain on your leg, unexplained, ramping up in difficulty to the skies, with zero actual reward for it. Thankfully, it can be disabled.

I played the 2.07B version in late 2019, if fixed a lot of bugs. The game is a fairly accurate recreation of the Pathfinder rules. The computer is a rather harsh DM though, so saving frequently is necessary. If you are not very well versed in how to min/max characters I'd recommend playing on an easier difficulty, the game seems balanced around system mastery. There are some key parts of the PnP game missing, you won't necessarily be able to find the weapon you want and you can't craft, bear that in mind when creating a character. The Kingdom management mini-game is novel, but isn't tightly integrated into the rest of the game. You wouldn't lose much if you set the kingdom to be managed by the computer. The companions are memorable, some are more likeable than others, they add a lot to the game. The main plot gives you some interesting villains to fight. There are a lot of sidequests, most aren't as memorable. I was engaged enough that after winning the game I was ready to roll a new character and start over that day. In short Pathfinder Kingmaker, after the patches, is a very solid game that comes close to living up to the standard set by the Baldur's Gate and classic Fallout games.