Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

Okay I reeeeallly like this game. partially because it reminds me of Baldurs gate, icewind dale and temple of elemental evil. It attempts to replicate the roleplaying experience like those games. The plotlines are interesting, the characters are fascinating and even the kingdom management is funish... Umm those are the positives. Now for the negatives: this game is huuuuuuge in terms of the amount of space it eats up on your hard drive, in the size of the updates (that do very little for the size that they are). The load times are also insane. Any switching between scenes, going from outside buildings to inside, or even within cave areas. Other players have also noted imbalances in difficulty settings. I dont notice that sort of thing normally but even on "easy" its harder then it should be. All these things have created a game that has a looot of potential but is verrrry hard to play at the moment so it has come off my computer until either a lot of problems are fixed or I have more time to devote to it (by that I mean more patience for insane load times) All

Too many bugs.... Almost no instructions, no "help" system in game. Random fights.... Same fight can be easy...or hard.... just quick load :/ I am big fan D&D 3.5 but this game is beauty and horrible in the same time....

I love the game. It has depth and has a very similar feel to old Baldurs Gate 1/2 etc. Also like those older games certain classes are more interesting / fun to play than others. That said this game has a major technical issue that will not be fixed anytime soon I fear and that is the ridiculous loading times. ONLY buy this game if you can install it on a fast SSD drive, otherwise the constant loading screens will drive you crazy. It will literally be 5 to 30 seconds of playing followed by 3 full minutes of loading on repeat. Having a super powerfull PC with loads of memory and insane speeds will not help you, it's just bad coding, you need to run this on a SSD.

Pathfinder is what happens when a game system is designed to be played in "min-max" mode. Basically this means game mechanics above story or everything else, with player characters that are ultra specialized in very niche things. To make the game challenging, therefore, even the most mundane of obstacles must be barely obtainable by application of some olympic level statistic or skill. Poor you if your adventuring party is deficient in some capability. Stack on top of this a repetitive card-based, resource poor, "choose the least terrible set of options" kingdom-building meta-game and you have a forced recipe for save scumming. Coming to the rescue are reduced difficulty setting choices, but they feel like they sound: something lesser than the full experience. To be honest, I did not deviate from normal except to eliminate some settings that would simply cause me to reload the most recent save (e.g. party character death ... yes, I am a cretin). Sometimes the game shines with puzzles or obstacle solutions available via the environment or dialogue. I found the game favors the player character who picks a lawful or good alignment, but is very tolerant of letting their party do whatever ... The main plot-line is not traditional and deals more with capriciousness than protagonism. The voice acting in English is mostly ok with some actors extremely overwrought and emotionally monotonic. Some of the text and dialogue is obviously written by someone challenged by English spelling and sentence structure. The combat, especially at the higher levels and with usage of haste, can be overwhelmingly busy. Some spells that should be able to be cast on a location with an area of effect, must instead be cast with a player or enemy as a target. As far as I can tell, once these are initiated, if the target moves, the area of effect does not move with it. Until used to it, this "feature" can result in some wasted resources. In summary, fun but looooooong ... and tiresome.

Almost 150 hours in and I'm not even close to the ending. It's huge, enthraling, complex, well written (mostly) and FUN. It's first RPG after many, many years which gripped me from the beggining and did not let loose. I've spend 8 hours just in the character creation part, so MANY possibilities. It's wonderfull experience, at least now after so many patches. If you liked BG, ICWD, Torment etc., you will love this game.