Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

It really saddens me to give this game just two stars. Being a game developer myself, I can see how much love, work and attention to detail was put into this game. But sadly, even in the remastered version, the game was completely unplayable for me. The Good: - Well written. Engaging story and characters. - Beautiful music and graphics. - Immersive, interesting and quite detailed world. - D&D mechanics done quite faithfully. -In-depth, immersive Kingdom management system. IMO much better than in NWN2 and DA Inquisition. The Bad: This game does a REALLY poor job communicating its mechanics to the player. - The journal is confusing and inconsistent. E.g. lots of quests have timers but only a few inform you about this. - The tutorial doesn't explain lots of the crucial mechanics and punishes you severely for that. Often the only way out is to reload several hours of gameplay, and half of the time you don't even know what went wrong. - Kingdom management and questing fight each other. 40 hours into the game I found that neglecting quests can actually destroy my kingdom, and I was wasting half of my questing time on hunting (which the game encouraged me to do). The only way to fix it was to start a new game. - The game is very unbalanced. Some encounters are no challenge at all, and others are nearly impossible to win. A laconic combat log doesn't help. - The performers really poorly (lags and loading screens). The Terrible: The bugs. And I'm not talking minor graphic/text/sidequests bugs. I'm talking blockers. This is the most buggy game I have ever played. As for now, about half of my playtime was wasted on trying to fix the bugs that won't let me progress. I feel like I'm fighting the game not of playing it. It's really, really sad, as aside from the bugs, the game is really fun and innovative. Even with its confusing mechanics and some pretty bad design choices, the game would still be a solid 4/5.

For me, contrary to popular opinion, this has been a refreshing turn in RPG's. After hours of Divinity OS1/2, it was pleasant to move on to something a little simpler. Combat difficulty is, as people say, a bit unbalanced, and as a DM of 10 years myself, it irritates me when my heroes are thrown into an encounter they can't possibly beat. Good rule of thumb as a DM: Don't kill your party without a good reason. However, with a few tweaks of difficulty scaling in the early game, you can get through it and see what the game really has to offer. The allignment system and branching dialog is satisfying in its diversity. The other characters are full of, well, character. They all represent someone we've played D&D/pathfinder with in person. My biggest complaint comes later with how much in game time it takes to manage your kingdom. One mission might skip you ahead 2 weeks, effectively failing all the objectives that arrise during that time. So be careful which missions you begin while also juggling time sensitive things. The developers appear at least to be constantly evening out the rough edges, so in time I'm sure my previously mentioned grievances will be resolved. All in all, I can recommend this game thorooughly, though perhaps waiting for a sale is a good idea.

This game should be used as a basic definition of bloat. The features and gameplay activities trip over each other while vying for your time, most of them half finished. They also LOVE wasting your time like there is no tomorrow. The setting is your typical fantasy, it is a good entry point. It is very stable and you shouldn't have technical problems with it. Even in spite of its TOO LONG gameplay time(later acts often feel more like a time waste than like something truly interesting) and all the FEATURE BLOAT, it IS VERY FUN. The basic moment - moment is nailed proficiently and you just want to go from a fight to fight, from adventure to adventure. The oft criticized Kingdom Management is just too strict with resources, otherwise it is fine(except mandatory wait times for the Bald Hilltop). Overall, I can recommend this one. With a caveat. Wrath of the Righteous is at least 10x better. Also, use the Call of the Wild and Bag of Tricks mods. Wrath is factually better(even the vanilla Wrath vs CotW Kingmaker), but there is fun to be had here as well. Get Call of the Wild and have fun!

I've never, ever in 40+ years of gaming come across a game that hates the player more than this game. - Re-loading is a core mechanic. You get very little information that you are about to step into a "trap" and get steamrolled, and it happens again and again and again (oh, and you cannot flee). - The real-time combat is confusing and chaotic, not helped by the rather poor pathfinding abilities of your party members, who don't mind walking right by enemies and getting hit in the back. - Not only is the balancing off in this game, but YOU ARE ON A TIMER! Then, at one point, the game ASKS YOU TO WAIT, but if you to, it's GAME OVER! What you actually needed to do was complete a bunch of very specific quests, but the game didn't tell you that. I don't think I've ever been this frustrated since... I don't know, Phantasie III?

I'd really like to give it at least one more star, but a json parsing bug has completely ruined my 30+ hours of gameplay time. Hopefully a fan patch can help out these issues as I doubt Owlcat are keeping bugfixes on high priority this late in its lifecycle. That said, I hear the kingdom management completely ruins everything enjoyable about the first half so it's probably best I stop on a high. Genuinely disappointed because there's so much in there to love if it had only focused on delivering a tight, stable, performant CRPG Pathfinder experience without the cruft