Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

Kingmaker is really difficulty to review. On the one hand it is of the best DnD CRPGs ever made but on the other hand it's a complete mess. First I have to mention that I didn't encounter any game breaking bugs so technical issues are not something you should worry about anymore. But the writing. The characters. Overly complicated kingdom management without any proper documentation what different things actually do. The timed quests. Difficulty spikes that are created only by increasing enemy's AC ~50 and making them immune to most effects and damage types. Those are some of the actual problems with the game. It's pretty clear that this game was too much for Owlcat to handle as a whole. There are so many things that feel half-finished and I think that the game would have been better if it would have been 100% combat focused, because that is where Kingmaker shines. The writing and characters are not simply interesting enough for a 100h game and kingdom management becomes a chore towards the end and isn't remotely interesting, all the events feel like items on a to-do list with some flavor text on top. But overall I had good time with the game and I'd say 90% of the fights are really fun and rewarding. Character customization is absolutely fantastic if you're into that and there are so many spells and abilities that you could just test different builds for years. It's a shame that the game steps on so many classic crpg pitfalls with it's disinteresting writing and half-baked mechanics.

First 50 hours or so are great, by the midgame it starts feeling like butter scraped over too much bread, in the last few chapters there's no butter left and it's just a rusty broken knife grinding against blackened rock-like piece of bread that your grandfather dropped in the cellar in 1964 and forgot about. Also, Owlcat needs to be forbidden by law from adding management minigames and timed quests to their RPGs.

Some bugs and balancing issues but I think this game has what POE lacked, a coherent story that does not make me yawn. The combat is responsive and requires some thought and timing. The biggest gripe I have is that the animations seem a little stiff.

I've played some 130+ hours of this game so far, and I've enjoyed a lot of it. The story isn't bad, the fighting can be fun, the map is fun to explore... the Kingdom/Barony management is fun, though I am unsure as to what effect it really has on the game-world itself. There seems to be a lot of content in the game, and that is great. There are a lot of areas to explore, and even with my amount of hours put in, I am still finding interesting encounters out in the wilds of the Stolen Lands. However, the game is also missing quite a bit. I cannot rely on mercenaries to run things, so hiring adventures and roleplaying them as "old friends" of the main character is out. The portraits the game comes with are very limited (though this can be alleviated by mods). The character models are almost impossible to match to the portraits (with or without mods). You cannot edit your own biography or the biography of your mercenaries... But all of that is small stuff. The big things are the characters not making sense within the story world (such as an open relationship between two former slaves in which one is possessive and yet also.. fine... with the open relationship? What?) And the world itself does not care who your character is beyond limited dialogue choices. For example, I played through a part where a dwarf forge can get destroyed twice; once with a human and once with a dwarf main character. BOTH times, the dialogue options were the same when the forge got destroyed, and BOTH times, the character who did it got off scot-free without a reprimand, despite the destruction being essentially heresy for any dwarf. I have a lot of complaints about this game, but... I also have a lot of fun with it and I've sunk a lot of hours into it. It's worth a play-through, I think. Just don't expect it to blow your mind or keep you riveted like Baldur's Gate or PS:Torment. This is a decent game, but very flawed.

In the tabletop RPG community there are tales of "That Guy". "That Guy" thinks all his ideas are great, he has no idea that his great ideas aren't fun for other p[layers and no matter how many times you tell him he doesn't listen. In this case "That Guy" is Owlcat games. Kingmaker is horrendiously balanced, on normal difficulty random encounters are so easy as to be pointless, most planned encounters are painfully overtuned with enemies having absurd attack bonuses, armor classes and saving throws. All this means if you aren't optimising your characters to the extreme you are going to be murdered by low level mobs repeatedly. Kingdom management is also plagued with horrible design choices, a single poor choice or failed saving throw can send your Kindom into a death spiral to which there is no escape. And I mean no escape, there are a few ways to fix your kingdom, most won't work because you have to roll to succeed and you will have massive penalties to your rolls. Promoting an advisor and actually improving your Kingdom takes 2 weeks in game time, during that 2 weeks you can't make any other decisions or take any actions, which means a critical action can take place and completely screw you over. The only saving grace here is you can turn the Kingdom management off, cutting out a significant portion of the game. There are positives, character creation is actually really good, there are enough options make a character for any playstyle. Story wise the world is interesting and the characters you will meet are well written mostly fun to have around with entertaining party banter (Except Harrim, seriously, guy needs some therapy). Buy it on sale.