Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

Like many other reviews, I want to say I love the CRPG aspects of the game. Love the building of characters, I enjoy even the cliche characters, etc. If you like rules heavy, DnD style spacebar pausing combat up a storm games to micro difficult encounters, you will enjoy this game. Like other reviews have said, yes this game does not explain a whole lot about certain features, but I'm still loving it. One thing I have not seen on many reviews or just touched on slightly that I think is important, is if you don't have a SSD hard drive, do not buy this game. I've played on my gaming laptop (2016 stats) without SSD, and my main desktop with, and there is a big, BIG difference. Even with the SSD though, I probably spent 20% of my time in game in loading screens. For some reason the kingdom making UI is graphics or computation intense? And without the ability to open your journal and check available time to complete certain quests/objectives, you have to leave the kingdom making UI, loading screen, ok now check journal, alright reload kingdom making UI, another loading screen, turns out I have enough to building points to maybe upgrade my town, ok another loading screen, nope not enough money, back to kingdom making UI, another loading screen, dont need to do anything in the UI now, and back to my character, another loading screen. Each one of these loading screens is between 3 and 25 seconds with the SSD. When I was doing kingdom management on my laptop without the SSD, I was able to read a book simutaneously. Really do enjoy the many different aspects, staying true to the roots, kingdom/character building, nice 6 player party size (I have room for a bard!) but for what you get on the kingdom UI (which doesnt seem like much more than a fancy map), load times are very frequent, and often long enough that makes the frequency irritating. If I would have just played this on my laptop without knowing the beauty of the SSD, I would have lost interest in the game.

I have played a lot of Isometric RPGs in the past few years and liked some enough to buy them again when i switched to GOG last year and I also have some experience as a DM for running my own camaigns, although I play Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms, not Pathfinder. In the case of CRPGs i have played everything from Obsidian and Larian as well as this game from Owlcat, including Pillars of eternity 1 and 2 (though i havent finished the second one), Tyranny, Divinity Original sin 1 and 2 (2 being my game of the year last year and one of my all time favourites) and I can say this game became my game of the year for 2018 and I have spent the past months playing it non-stop. I will go over the good, the bad, and finally compare it to DOS2 so people get a better grasp of it. The Good: The story: which grabbed my attention right of the bat, with a plot in which you start as an adventurer on a quest and follow a belivable chain of events (By DnD standars). The characters: which are some of the goofiest and campiest NPCs this side of the world, and I love it. Everyone has their own alignments and beliefs and make for some great side quests which they play completely straight without any self references but also don't take themselves so seriusly that it turns you off. The Gameplay: much like playing a DnD campaign, felt very familiar to me. The Bad: The Bugs: mostly fixed by now but still prevalent in some areas and questline, Wildcards DLC bugged out for me and cutscenes wouldn't start even though they were prompted by dialogue. Save often. Crafting: non-existent, even for wizards which are supposed to be able to write scrolls in DnD or create items, severely underpowered. Party: not large enough. Pacing: Turtle crawl, unskipable cutscenes and unforgivable loading times. Comaprisson: the main difference is in combat, in DOS2 the battle was decided moment to moment. In Pathfinder, wether you win or lose is determined by your buffs and preparation time.

I really enjoy the game so far. The choices all have a very nice bit of personality to them. I do feel like the interactions between characters is a little cheesy or forced but it's easy to forgive in my case. My one true hangup is the time management part of the game. I find it hard to focus on exploring the map and doing general adventure activities when I am constantly called back to my barony to solve some sort of issue. Most of which I feel should be easily done by the representitives without direct input. I know you can turn that to auto-mode but for my first playthrough it felt wrong to do so.

When Kingmaker first came out, it was very buggy. You'll see this if you go look at the 'most helpful' reviews since they're all years old by this point. With the release of the enhanced edition, a vast majority of those bugs and balancing issues have been resolved. The game runs fine and running into game breaking bugs doesn't happen anymore, at least for the vast majority of users. The game itself is obviously based on the Pathfinder RPG tabletop system with a few tweaks for running in a real-time with pause format without any grid based battle map. Fans of the tabletop will probably be irked at the real time system, though there is a fan mod that adds it back into the game, but for most the real time system works just fine. Gameplay consists of building your character by picking their race, class, and starting statistics like any RPG, and then giving you a few party members to go malice bandits in the wilderness with. Fairly typical CRPG so far, except that by using the Pathfinder system, you get a vast array of choices when it comes to character building. The game isn't great at helping you learn the ropes, but even on normal you'll be fairly alright so long as you don't make drastically poor decisions (A wizard trying to knife fight, for instance). You can customize the difficulty as much as you like, tweaking things until you feel it's just right for you, so in theory anyone could finish the game. The story of the game is so-so, interesting enough to keep you wanting to play but nothing to write home about. The characters are subjective, but I found them all interesting in their own ways. Kingdom Management is where the game really falters, unfortunately, and the devs never really got around to fixing this part - you'll want mods for sure, even with the Crisis Point system being added. If you like most CRPGs, you'll like Kingmaker. If you love character building, you'll be cursed to never leave the first chapter due to alt-itis. Definitely worth a buy.

I'm not going to lie, this review is more of an excuse to vent some of my frustrations. There's plenty to like about Pathfinder: Kingmaker if you're into cRPGs, and there are many in-depth reviews that go further into detail than I'd ever like to. So instead, I'm just going to share why I am right now dropping this game after 38 hours of enjoyable gameplay, with probably about 2/3 of the main story still to go. As the title might have clued you in, one the main draws of the game is its kingdom building/management mechanic. This essentially boils down to the player alternately holding court and then spending most of his time travelling around his lands solving all sorts of minor or major problems. The management side of this largely consists of sending your advisors (which you recruit out of your party companions) on different missions to solve on their own. There are 5 different advisor positions in total, and the game explicitly tells you in a tutorial message that you will find 2-3 possible candidtates to fill each of these positions. Now here's what happened to me: in my playthrough, I noticed that one of these positions (treasurer) remained empty, as none of the companions I had come across could be appointed to it. As I was about to enter into the next phase of the main quest, I took to Google to find out where I could find a fittingly capitalistic companion. I quickly learned that I had angered one of the potential candidates, because my ruler didn't put with his unethical behaviour. That's cool, I like that my decisions have consequences. So I checked for other candidates which should be available to me at that point in the game. And this is where learned that I had basically bricked my savegame about 20 hours ago when I explored a location near the kingdom's capital before I was prompted to do so. Because of this, I was never prompted to explore it at the right time to find a fairly essential companion and now I would have to start a new game. No thanks.