Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

I've been playing video games for nearly 30 years. I have never been as frustrated with a gaming experience as this one. There are good moments in the game, but the insane difficulty spikes toward the end game, extremely limited options to the core advisor system, and rushed pacing of the game detract from what might be a solid RPG experience. After HOURS of attempting the final boss battle, I had to give up and uninstall the game. I play games for the story, not the challenge. I naively thought that a game which gave me a "story" difficulty mode would not require rogue-like trial and error, pinpoint min-maxing, and/or flat out exploiting the game engine to complete the narrative. If I wanted any of those things, there are FIVE other difficulty settings which cater to varying degrees of difficulty. Why give me the option to play my way if you're just going to railroad me into a hardcore experience to finish a story I invested 60+ hours in? The advisor system is incredibly disappointing. For a game built around managing a kingdom, you are left with such incredibly limited options as to who will fill your various advisor posts. Due to some of my gameplay choices, I had two advisor positions completely unfilled. I get the devs added a way to put created Mercs in those roles, but my created characters were mute and it completely broke my immersion. And, considering you lose the game if enough poor kingdom choices are made, this is a huge oversight. Finally, I hate being forced to make choices at an artificially accelerated pace. There's a shot clock running in the background which prevented me from fully exploring the game. I get wanting to create a sense of urgency, but when doing so prevents you from exploring in an RPG setting, it's incredibly frustrating. I have never wished so much to have my time and money back. I feel like I have wasted my time on a brutal bait and switch. DO. NOT. BUY. unless you enjoy dark souls-like difficulty.

I wanted to love this game so much. I'm a big fan of old-school CRPGs and PnP RPGs like D&D and even Pathfinder itself. While this game is very faithful to Pathfinder, it is so buggy! I mean REALLY buggy! I'm talking Bethesda Fallout 76 levels of buggy! And inline with Bethesda with each new patch, some bugs are fixed, but they introduce new ones. At the time of writing we are on version 2.0j. However the version log only goes up to 2.0h, so there are two patches which we do not know what is going on, and to make things worse, the DLCs are no longer compatible with the game! The developers own DLCs do not work with an up-to-date game! Now that's a bug that Bethesda would be proud of. If you notice, I am talking very little about the game, and alot about the bugs. But that is because you will be spending more time bug-fixing than playing the game. Between long load times and game-crashing bugs, you will be playing very little of the game for your time. I keep checking back to see if bugs are fixed, but it is still unplayable.

Christ where to begin... I like to play rpg so that i do everything I can with all quests all locations etc, but this game make me not develop my characters and their gear but just rush ahead to main story quests so that my Kingdom is not dead because of some shitty event. But lets spread it a little: 1. This game has a TON of time restrictions for doing quests. I get it 1-2 restriction is ok but EVERY main quest got those? Why on what darn reason?! Only thing it does is making you abandon exploring because you need to be either doin main quest or being near your main city so you can assign ppl so you dont game over... 2. The story of this game sheesh it began interesting, with fay and political intrigue but 2 steps later Look here is main bad guy everything that happens is his fault go kill him >.> 3. Some quests and COMPANIONS are miss-able and not because you decide you dont want them, the game doesn't tell you bout possibility and if you do some stuff you can be easily hard locked from 1-2 companions. 3. Alchemists are ridiculously OP especially enemy alchemists with their infinite bombs. 4. The difficulty levels are atleast dumb, I'm not some glorious strategist so i normally play on normal but settings there easily allow your characters to be oneshot because of one crit. Secondly for a game where there is timer for every quest, making all encounters so that you need to rest after fight to heal/restock spells is ridiculous. 5. Some positives game has awesome effects and generally is really pretty. 6. Do NOT try to manage your kingdom on your own or you will be swarmed with stupid problems that take month to solve and stack onto each other. IF someone wants to play this game ahead of time go to nexus and get mods for it otherwise you will be hurt. OHHH almost forgot this game has bugs FROM 2018 in 2020 that devs said they will fix but didn't(dont believe? check steam forums >.>)

A faithful translation of Pathfinder DnD mechanics with interesting story and well-written companions. A few major gripes that prevent me from giving it a higher score. It suffers from a common problem in DnD CRPGs, in that early game (levels 1-4) combat is EXCRUCIATING, due to the sheer volume of combat your characters are expected to engage in and the lack of resources at your disposal. Unless you've min-maxxed your character you'll have low AC, HP and BAB meaning you'll get hit a lot, killed a lot and have trouble hitting anything back. Also at low levels you can put as many points as you can into a skill and max out its associated stat and you'll still fail a check because "dice says no". Get used to F5ing and F8ing a lot. Once you hit level 5 and onwards, you've got some toys to play with and can actually make a mistake without it ending your career and reliably pass a few skill checks. The game starts to open up and becomes actually fun when you can give poor F5 and F8 some well-deserved rest. The other major problem is the poor optimization that results in noticable FPS drops even on high-end hardware, particularly when the game tries to render fire animations for some reason, or when there are a lot of corpses on-screen, or sometimes just randomly for the hell of it. The game looks nice, but not "that" nice.

It's a big game, but I found myself sitting around wondering "okay, do you really expect me to grind for another 30+ hours just to advance the plot? It turned out, the answer was yes. The game feels like a foundation with plot thrown in for flavor, but it didn't feel sufficiently connected to bring me from one thing to the next. Also, several critical events I skipped the first time through because ... I didn't go to a particular location at the right time when there was nothing to tell me to go there, no journal entry, no quest marker. Ended up being rather annoying. Also, is it really too much to ask that on the world map I have something between "no names, no quest markers" and "all the names and your quest markers that you can barely find because the names are in the way"?