Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

At least as far as I can tell. It's the same game engine with pretty much same systems (if slightly tweaked) with a different story and classes. Class/build system being the only big difference aside from story. If you liked PoE - you'll probably like this. If you had a grudge with combat system or technical implementation like I did - avoid.

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Game Won't Start!!

The designer's choices on what mechanics to port over from the pen and paper and which ones they left behind is baffling. With only one combat speed in the real time enviroment while mixing in the inititive portion from the table top game, you end up in disjoined transitions from traveling mode to combat mode. The pace at whcih you level is pathetic to the amount of combat you see, the experience awarded way below what you would receive in the table top version. Often requiring scum saving to make through areas, as the stupid intitive system can suddenly make your whole group pause and then take a rain of crippling spells. Even worse is the delay between requesting the casting of the spell and when the spell is cast oftem make line and area effect spells worthless. Monster power often spikes abruptly and without warning, resualting in constantly having to "scout" through dying. The adventures and situtations you are shoehorned is literally the resault of having your character's chain yanked all over the place by the villians. Even worse you end up with an entire roster of heroes who are worthless unable to go and resolve issues without your own personal attention. Missions often ignore the existence of the stealth skill or the fact that the invisibility spell exists. A good example is on a mission where you have to sneak into an enemy camp to chanllenge an enemy leader. A stleath mission where you have to absoultly do everything on the rails is bad design, especially when you should just be able to dimension door your own hero into the camp, use invibility, or just use your rediciliously high stealth skill to by pass guards. The companions you find along the way are some of the most poorly created characters both from stat arrangement, to class setup. It is the most attrocious I have seen in one of these games. Most characters are shallow as well. That is before you get to the pain that is nation managment. Thankfully you can turn that off.

Ok, so this game is L O N G, 95 hours and still not finished. It is a good game, nothing you have not seen before, except for the kingdom management stuff which is their original bit. Now for the criticism: the characters are a bit contrived - the shouty barbarian, the annoying halfling bard... - and the dialogues are quite basic. The romance dialogues in particular are cringe inducing - don't try them at home, you are bound to get sorely disappointed! Really, only one black character??? And not even romanceable. There are more green than brown people in the game. Another aspect which is quite irritating is that if you don't do certain quests in a particular order, you can get locked out of important bits and even companions. That is quite annoying as you have to google stuff every now and then to make sure you will not miss out on anything important, which risks spoiling the experience. Also, the areas are not marked by level so you might go in thinking you got this and halfway through run into a very high level baddie which has you going back to an earlier save (Lonely Barrow I am looking at you!). However, you have to commend the team of Owlcat Games for the huge effort and achievement. Don't kid yourself, regardless of any issues this game has, if you are a fan of isometric RPGs a la Baldur's Gate, you should play this.