Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

I like the general gameplay structure and i like some of P/Ks rather unique additions to the Crpg formula. Im not going to complain about the visual design (which is charming) or the soundtrack which is well executed and mirrors other modern and older crpgs well. What i cannot stand is the awful writing. Virtually everything from flavor text, journal entries, item/npc descriptions, companion dialogue or player dialogue is horribly written. Its not just that its pulpy and cliche and utilizes every tired trope under the sun. I dont care that much about that. Its just that its plainly bad. it makes me cringe. it almost offends me with how bad it is. and if it isnt making me grind my teeth its just boring. i expected at least BG1 or NWN quality of writing. most fanfiction is going to be better than this game. while the game does offer some reactivity to your actions or dialogue choices, the dialogue choices you get are just awful for roleplaying. often you get just two or a few lines to choose from which are all assuming a certain personality with certain motivations which you didnt give your character yourself. and the choices you get are not varied enough to compensate that. the writers just love to put words in your imagined characters mouth. this is a mistake i didnt expect from a game where i am not playing a premade character. the dialogue choices are also very binary. you get to choose between being a valiant knight in shining armor or an evil baby eating grunt with a cheese eating grin. i get that these sort of roleplaying issues happen from time to time in a lot of rpgs even classics but its usually not a permanent issue. its a shame really. i was willing to overlook a lot of the flaws others complain about but writing like this belongs in a Uwe Boll movie. go on and make up your own mind but dont say you werent warned.

But this one game breaking bug keeps happening that corrupts my entire save. It's always at this one part and I can't continue to play. I have to start a new game if I want to play. That being said, I hope noone else experiences this, it is awful and they don't seem to have any intention of fixing it.

I'm an enormous sucker for isomentric, party-based RPGs, but this game just wasn't ready to be released. Too many of the quests are either out-and-out broken or can be accidentally broken with no way to fix or proceed in them. I'm writing this review after finding out that the reason I can't complete one of my quests is that the NPC isn't showing up where she should be. The game also makes the player sit through way too many loading screens, too many times where your party has to slowly walk from one end of a zone to the other, and other wastes of time. Managing your kingdom might require going through three loading screens just to check on something or spend two seconds ordering a building to be built. The overworld map and kingdom managing UI really have no excuse for not being kept in memory. The time that the game eats up transitiong between them bogs it down to an unacceptable degree. And then there's the horribly unbalanced combat and innapropriate placement of ecnounters. Early game you will be dying in stupid, frustrating battles where your characters are getting one-shotted. It's gotten better by the time I've played to, but the early game is a real slog, and almost made me quit it. Story-wise, there's noting special or interesting so far. It would be servicable if the rest of the game were functional, but it's not enough to justify playing through this thing.

This game got something refreshing. It's very nice to play most of the game. Nice gameplay, story, writing and all... I have to say i got addicted to it rapidly. The game is quite hard, but you can overcome that with a little effort.... BUT this is UNTIL you arrive to the last 2 chapters.... then you are doomed... FRUSTRATION, DESPAIR, this is not something your characters are going to experience, but YOU WILL.... The end is so broken that you come to think that developers dont want you to finish the game. All the love for this game vanish just to be replaced by HATRED.... All the efforts you put in the game are wasted on a developer's WHIM just to tell you : "you can't beat GOD my dear son, so cry" Just to see the end of the game i HAD to cheat on easy mode ??? What kind of game need you to cheat on easy mode ?? And i had to retry several time even with that BECAUSE, on a whim, a blink, a bad dice roll any character can die. Seriously, you can enjoy this game very much until chapter 5. At this point just consider droping and look at the end on youtube, if you dont want to be frustrated so hard you'll not touch CRPG for months....

If you are familiar with tabletop gaming, you know there are several tactics that have become signs of poor gamemastering and should be avoided: railroading, lying to players, and changing rules. The makers of this game indulge in all of these tactics, which unfortunately ruins what could have been an otherwise enjoyable, if limited, game. As is too often the case these days, tedious was substituted for challenging, deliberate time-wasting for engaging, and game-breaking actions discoverable only through save-scumming. The last straw was permanently killing a player-controlled character through an (unskippable) cut scene, removing the only access the party had to a spell that made the final dungeon possible. Removing player agency in this way is not dramatic, it does not add poignancy, it merely reduces what should be a game to a poorly made movie: to couple this with a final act of player sabotage is to betray the trust gamers are required to place in those few companies fortunate enough to produce a game. If this company ever produces another game, I will not purchase it.