Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

Maaaaan was I hoping this game to be special... I guess no more pre-ordering pc games from me. What are my current issues with the game: 1. Party formation with mages and I'd say maybe rangers is mandatory. Mages need to kill some specific monsters (including STORY monsters) and I think rangers are needed for better hunting to don't spend millions on rations and all that. But I may be wrong on rations. 2. Background of party members (at least some of them) is extremely SJWed and modernized in general. I'm especially surprised to see what they gave to barbarian. 3. Difficulty spikes. Although this can be related to issue in item 1. But literally the first side quest you get is unbeatable. At the time of recieving it - you don't have any mages. Unless you're one of them. 4. Extremely idiotic and blind people in tutorial. I'm sorry, but if me just grabbing some people in fire and ragging them out of fire room in the same direction I'm already going to considered an evil action... and evil person shows mercy to somebody who kept him and his beloved or very close friend?! Come on... 5. Hard crash. Or whatever those are called on pc when entire pc is frozen and monitor shows some colorful trippy squares all over. So far happened only once, but who knows what will happen. This is a pc game after all. 6. Current feel of "meh" from rather everything in the game. What I like: 1. Good to be introduced to pathfinder universe

TL;DR: Great game, many character creation options. Some minor bugs and design flaws. "Make your own Kingdom" theme is awesome. Best difficulty adjustment freedom I've ever seen, use it! Have experience with CRPGs like Divinity: Original Sin 1-2, Pillars of Eternity, Shadowrun, Dragon Age: Origins and Baldur's Gate. Before this game I knew nothing about Pathfinder. Normal difficulty, finished Act 1, nearly level 6. Playing on normal, some fights are easy like random bandit encounters, while some encounters require good use of buffs, debuffs, positioning and target prioritization. You can have nearly as many quick/auto save slots as you want. Use them! I am completely dumbfounded, what all the fuss with the difficulty is about. I read reviews where people are angry that they cannot steamroll the game when playing on a difficulty setting literally called "unfair". Like, what did you expect, knobhead? Swarms: You start the game with 2 free torches, reading the hints on loading screens helps here. If you sold those in the beginning and also didn't immediatly bought a rope, you fail as adventurer and should just be a farmer instead. Will-o-Wisp: a camp in the middle of nowhere with dead bodies lying around - good difficulty telegraph. If you camped here not expecting to get hit, you're a fool. Wererats: Not a single telegraph to be found. Definitly an issue and the devs screwed this one up, but you have a million saves. PoE exhausted me with time wasting novel-length dialogue which didn't matter. While P:K goes straight to the interesting parts while still having enough flavor. Playing a neutral good I found plenty opportunities to express my alignment. If you are into minmaxing a blank adventurer is a powerful tool and that shouldn't be cheap. Have a great equiped party of "subpar" premade companions, or hold off on buying that +1 armor and sword, but get a minmaxed char as result. Your choice. PS: need more than 2000 characters please!

This is the game I've been missing. I'm an old fan of fallout and baldurs gate from back in the nineties. I've played the new ones: pillars, wasteland, divine divinity, tyranny and thought they were decent. Part of me though that the genre might never have been that great. This game is proving me wrong. I love it, I think it's getting everything right about the genre. But it's hard in the same ways those games were hard, so if that's not your thing make sure to lower the difficulty without shame. Play it and enjoy it.

The campaign behind the game is one of the better pen&paper adventure modules out there. It's massive in scope and depth and, according to what I've played till now (middle of second act) quite well implemented. Unfortunately the game is a "bugfest". While remaining mostly playable, the amounts of bugs in quests, rule implementations, balance and general "glitchiness" is quite high. Mind you, not especially more than most other games freshly published, the "1.0 is the new beta" seems to be an established practice today, Still, I suggest to anybody that want to go deep into the game and not play casually to wait a bit that at least the most egregious bugs get fixed.

Been playing cRPGs for 20years now, never seen a game as bugged and badly balanced as this. Final chapter is big middlefinger to all players. Stay away unless you have masochistic urges.