Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

There's a lot to love about Kingmaker as it oozes with great story, fun characters and huge amount of little details. It's more than obvious that Owlcat really poured their heart and soul into every quest as well as great many locations - truly one of the most impressive roleplaying games out there. Where I think the game missed the mark though is the difficulty curve, especially when you're playing the game for the first time and aren't yet aware of the many death traps, be it wildly unbalanced encounters or otherwise. This is especially true at the beginning of the game, when your party is still just a bunch of weaklings, prone to failing skill checks, stat draining or dying to an unfortunate critical hit. Unless you're willing to play on a difficulty with nerfed enemies and keep adjusting it based on your power level, the gameplay sadly tends to degenerate into save-scumming galore.

I find the combat, the environment, and the mechanics of this game are good to great. Many have complained about balancing issues, but even after playing with several different classes (including squishy spellcasters) I haven't really met any problem I couldn't solve without altering my party or trying a different strategy. That being said, I've been playing on the normal difficulty. The real problem with this game are the seemingly endless amount of game breaking bugs. Quests that don't complete properly, fail to trigger, or break halfway through. Class feats and abilities that are supposed to have an effect but don't. Items that you are supposed to collect that are time-locked and disappear after leaving an area. Didn't pass that hidden perception check while you were there? Too bad. Those other 9 items you spent collecting are now useless. I really wanted to love this game (and maybe I will after a few patches), but as it stands, it is a flawed kind of fun. You can be having great fun for 30 minutes only to run into a quest breaking bug that forces you to backtrack an hour. Googling workarounds for bugs breaks immersion and otherwise cheapens what would be a great experience. My advice: Wait until a major patch comes along and then pick it up. It will definitely be worth playing then.

So this game was so close to five stars for me. Good solid adventuring game. Now the next part is a bit of a spolier but its also a trope in games. I wont say how tese events occur, or why, or with/to who. But.... in a game where you spend many many hours crafting a team of 6 PCs you dont take them and start killing them off at the very end of the game. All it made me wish is that I just used 5 mercenaries instead of the "special" PCs. It's just bad design. To me the game was 5/5 until the very last dungeon with "unfortunate" villian.

In general its a great game with a decent story, split into several events all concluding around the focus of a full campaign spaning from lvl 1-20. The amount of content is huge, which might put some people off, but personally I like it. It took me about 160h to finish everything I found. Characters are decent, some more interesting than others, altho there isn't much dialogue with them past the initial info dump convo. It offers customisable rulesets, letting you customise your difficulty, but there are issues with higher difficulties. I like the kingdom manegment, its simple but not for everyone and there is a lot to manage, luckily there is an option to autopilot it. Mostly it revolves around skill checks for your companions along with building cities and even individual buildings. Now the negatives. Its riddled with bugs that can ruin your encounter, not making saves vs spells when you should be, spells not working as intended, command inputs that do not follow through etc. UI is cluncky, no camera rotation is a big miss imo. The biggest offender is the terrible RNG, now I know its a core part of cRPG, but this game consistently lowrolls, the median roll being around 7 which is terrible. The lower lvl gameplay esspecially is one of the most obnoxious, tedious I've seen in a game. In a nutshell combat looks like this: miss, miss, miss, nat 20, miss miss miss hit miss... Thats not fun! And even later when your main dps rolls 2,2,1,3,3 on full attack in clutch situation turns a difficult encounter in a losing one. This has happened a lot during the plathrough. Difficulty while customisable is pretty bad, setting enemies in normal gives them +2 AC which isn't normal and anything higher gives them more AC and attack with no new abilities or tactics, which only makes the RNG problem worse. Unless you're a min maxer playing on higher difficulties is a waste of time and nerves. Great game in concept, but bad RNG, bugs, UI, keep it from being a truly great game

...and for all the wrong reasons. The plot of the game is fine, with some engaging quests and interesting mechanics. But it's all overshadowed by how much time the game wants You to waste on random systems. The game is about 160 hours long. A fair amout of this time is either traveling through an overworld (and you will be traveling A LOT) at a snails pace or resting because You got fatigue from traveling. It also has very engaging random encounters while You travel to slow You down even more. There are perception checks while You travel that reveal hidden locations crucial to the plot but You dont know where those are so You will be traveling even more to find them. You will also be resting even more because the game loves throwing enemies that do ability damage or drain levels. Do Yourself a favour and download at least a fast travel mod.