Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

This game could be great but there's several design flaws that prevent me from continuing the game. Combat is horribly balanced and the kingdom management failure flags are awful. I'm at the point where the troll invasion is impossible to fix and my team is too weak to kill the source of the invasion so I basically have to starter over. That's not acceptable game design.

The game is optimized very poorly. There are many game breaking bugs. You spend most of the time looking at the loading screens. Other than that it's a cool game, but the plot is pretty standard.

You may pick this up expecting to play Pathfinder on your laptop, I recommend you don't. Pathfinder Kingmaker is... Flawed. There are NUMEROUS significant issues with the game that will irk longtime fans of PF, and leave new players pulling their hair out. The story is solid, we'll get that out of the way now, but most everything else suffers from some astounding development decisions. First, the characters. Your party is made of you and up to 5 other NPC's you'll recruit throughout the game. Each of them is terrible. They are class locked from a base level of 3 into a class and subclass, and you cannot change it. Some of their decisions are downright terrible. Not a single one of them is a well built character that can pull it's own weight. You can hire mercs, all of which are lower level than you. By A LOT. Second is the balance. The developers have no concept of difficulty scaling, and it shows. The first chapter of the game has you go on a short (90 days in game) campaign to kill a tyrant in a forest, and for succeeding you get the land. The final boss is a level 4 encounter, and you can take his encounter (him and about 40 goons) at level 2 if you're smart. On the other hand, in the level 1 Kobold mine are webs that will shut down your entire party because they are coded to become a permanent part of the background and can't be burned away. Get stuck in some at any character level, just altF4 and start a new game. The web does not ever go away, and if even ONE part member is stuck in it, you're not able to move to the next area. You also level FAR slower than in any RPG I've ever seen, that includes actual pathfinder, and half of the spells are broken (see invisibility does not work, for example). The game isn't difficult, it's tedious. Some of this is fixed with mods, most isn't. You can download a mod to reclass NPC's, get more exp, fix a handful of spells, so on so forth. But that is something you expect from Bethesda. Avoid unless the devs fix it.

It seems to be pretty standard when reviewing this game, but I'll throw in my agreement. The game's story, chatacters, and basic design are incredible. Everything you could want in a CRPG. It's what DOESN'T work that will make you throw your laptop out the window in frustration. At the time if this review, many, MANY of the items do not work as advertised if they work at all, and even some spells fail completely. I just noticed today that Freedom of Movement provides absolutely ZERO protection against paralysis... which is what it was specifically created for. Most of the quests have some issues if they are not outright impossible to complete. This game is insanely frustrating at best. In fairness, the developers are correcting issues, albeit very slowly. Putting out DLC when the game is in this state is irresponsible to say the least. Hopefully they will correct these issues soon and we will have a game that will be a treasure for years to come.

The average rating of this game is unfairly suffering from the bugged state it was in when it got launched. The developers have put in an incredible amount of work and dedication (something I have never seen from big studios like Bethesda) to fix as much of it as possible. So as of today, the game is in great shape and if you are even remotely interested in Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity, you should definitely give this a try.