Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

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3.6/5

( 662 Reviews )

3.6

662 Reviews

English & 5 more

Posted on: March 15, 2019

GearsandCogs

Verified owner

Games: 231 Reviews: 2

A Sad Mess

There are several issues here. The biggest problem can be summarized as the game is simply a bit of a jerk. It feels like a DM designed the encounters wanting to kill their players (that is NOT the goal of a good DM, his role is to make fun). A great example is an early encounter of your lvl 2 party involves running into a spider swarm in a cave on a fetch quest. In Pathfinder rules, spider swarms can only be hit by splash weapons. If you don't have splash damage, you'll do a lot of 0 damage to the swarm with your swords or arrows and get killed. Most players will die fighting. You were given splash flasks, you probably didn't put them in your quick slots though. So, you'll have to reload after you get team killed. That kind of design simply is not fun. You don't save scum the tabletop game. Some other general problems: - Lack of direction for low level party, many places you stumble upon are too hard to win against. - Lots of loading and some levels are extremely small housing just 1-2 encounters/areas. - Encountering enemies you can't possibly deal with early on (i.e. you can run into a random fire elemntalwhile just travelling about). - Stupidly buffed enemies. I played on normal or challenge at the time and randomly stumbled upon 2 goblins vs my 5 person lvl 2 party. This should be a stomp per rules, one had 25 AC. That's dumb, took like 40 attempted hits to kill him. - Poorly designed NPC companions, while many enemies have buffed up stats and bonuses your companions are not min-maxed instead being more designed around flavor. For example, the barbarian has only +1 dex (basically a joke), there's 2 wizard companions, one is an evil melee caster build and another is a wizard/rogue that has 8 con (basically guaranteeing no HP) . It is inconsistent that your companions be so non optimal relative enemies. - Following above, designing your own team is expensive costing lots of gold unless you do it at level 1.

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Posted on: June 30, 2019

madvena

Verified owner

Games: 220 Reviews: 2

I guess it's fixed!

I think the two most important things to take away from my review are regarding bugs, and balance. TL;DR... it's fixed. I see some reviews from 2018 complaining about bugs, some stating "avoid until it's fixed". Well, it must be fixed! I haven't encountered any issues. I have also not seen any real balance issues. Random encounters while traveling tend to be easy, and if you explore areas that are in your "starting area" later on down the game, you'll feel fairly omnipotent. This is to be expected. I've had to re-do a handful of combats after rushing in with reckless abandon, but that is also expected. Balance seems good, to me. I'm playing on normal. I was also warned before running into swarms that you need to use AOE damage on them, or magic. I'm not sure whether that was just on a loading screen tip, or if it was elsewhere as well. So... seems like the developer has fixed those issues, as called out in a seemingly rather significant patch ("enhanced edition"). Good for them! So, without those issues, how is it? For me, it's great. It reminds me of Baldur's Gate more than any of the other cRPGs that have been coming out (Pillars, Tyranny, Divinity). I enjoyed Pillars ad Tyranny both, but this is much closer to the experience I was looking for. I couldn't get into either Divinity game... I wanted to like them both, but they didn't hold my attention at all. If you're not aware, Pathfinder is very similar to AD&D 3.5. If you're familiar with that, you'll feel quite at home. If you're familiar with most any D&D game, it'll be fairly straight forward and you should be pretty comfortable with the spells and abilities. If you're NOT familiar, I'd recommend looking up some builds online and picking one you like, to start. The amount of options for character creation can be a bit overwhelming. Or wing it, you can always respec later! Thanks for reading... I hope you pick up the game, and enjoy it as much as I do!

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Posted on: November 15, 2024

JKatulski

Verified owner

Games: 59 Reviews: 1

Mid game, weak RPG

I understand that this game maybe works as a digital port of Pathfinder tabletop system. But aside from complicated character builder there isn't really much. The story if written poorly, seems very juvenile like something a high school student could try to write when trying to dream of an "epic fantasy novel that will be remembered and is totally not something like Tolkien". Characters are annoying and very shallow. I like reading, but in this case it seems like there is lack of balance between voice acting and written dialogue parts. There seems that there's no reason to follow the story, it's hard to tell what is the main plot. The game is also ugly. I know that graphics are not the most important when it comes to RPGs, but here they are just ugly, models look weird, and the art style of portraits is inconsistent to the extent that some of them look like caricatures, and some of them fit the game. However, a lot of portraits do not fit what you can do in the game at all. For example - there is a beautifully drawn portrait of a seemingly vampire mage, with claws and fangs and blood on their lips. Why add this, when this game doesn't allow your characters to become vampires at all? It feels like a lot of the portraits were supposed to be used for some characters that weren't implemented at all. There is some creativity to the kingdom management system, it is mostly fine, allowing for some fun. But then when you visit the village that you are building in the system it is just a generic map with unnamed characters. So why bother? So most of the game boils down to combat, which isn't really satisfying, both in real time and in turn mode. Combat isn't really tactical, positioning doesn't really matter that much, especially in terms of verticality, there is no interaction with the environment at all. All in all - this feels like ordering DnD from Temu

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Posted on: October 2, 2018

Winterbass

Verified owner

Games: 192 Reviews: 1

Like playing with a mean DM

This game heavily favors enemies unless you adjust the difficulty until the enemy's stats become worthless. Playing on "Normal", you'll be constantly missing while the enemy will be constantly hitting you. The only method of leveling the playing field is to go into a battle to see what enemies you are up against, reloading and then buffing yourself appropriately. The enemies have high AC and often have some form of damage reduction laid on top of it. In general you want your heroes to hit about between 60 to 70 percent of the time, but in this game it feels more like 40 percent. I've had too many encounters where one enemy is getting pummeled by six characters for multiple rounds of combat, only for one or two attacks to hit. The random encounters also vary heavily. Running into an inescapable CR14 encounter with a level 6 party is unacceptable. As a PC and DM of Pathfinder for six years, it's not okay to make every encounter APL+2. On top of that, the encounters don't give the appropriate amount of XP for their CR rating. The resting forces you to always forage for food unless you have a specific ration item in your inventory. It doesn't matter if you have 20 piles of meat in your inventory or 15 entire chickens, you're still forced to forage for food unless you have that ration item. You're especially doomed if you are in an underground location that locks you out of leaving until you finish it. You're not allowed to rest here because you can't forage for food so that means you can't replenish health of your abilities. Great. Finally, the game is awful at explaining its mechanics to the player. This information should be clear, especially to people completely unfamiliar with Pathfinder rules. If I have to whip out my own physical Pathfinder books, you've done a bad job at explaining. Overall, the game is very solid but the unbalanced combat ruins the experience as you progress through the game.

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Posted on: November 29, 2018

whogivesascooby

Verified owner

Games: 19 Reviews: 1

An okay game if you like CRPG

I picked up this game after watching a youtuber play it (CohCarnage) and it looked like he was having a lot of fun. I had read other reviews that scored it fairly low however I put it down to personal opinions and decided to give it a try myself. I enjoyed about 3/4 of the game. The story was good and the gameplay was a lot of fun. There were a few minor gripes such as no ability to reroll my character and I felt that the movement speed was too slow. I ran into a few bugs but I joined the party late and most of the game breaking bugs had been squashed. I took part in Kingdom Management to try run a decent kingdom but found that no matter how hard I tried to keep my kingdom running smoothly I could never make them happy (they were stuck on stable and constantly fell into worried even though I solved 99% of the problems). Eventually I turned it to auto as I wasnt enjoying it and felt what I was doing was pointless. Everything fell apart towards the end of the game for me. In my opinion the spawns were too unbalanced and the enemy saving throws were way too high making my main character feel almost completely worthless (sorc). I didnt enjoy the maze/puzzle section in the first world and after a while I gave up trying to figure it out myself and relied on youtube players to guide me. It was just taking too long and felt tedious to fight mass spawns of tanky enemies while trying to figure out where to go. The final act of the game was even worse as a spellcaster as my character actually became completely worthless and I had to count on my melee characters to carry me all the way to the final boss. I thought the story ended okay and I was happy to see the outcomes of the choices I had made during my playthough at the end of the game. I have rated it fairly low but I would give it a 2.5 out of 5 if I had the option. If you are a fan of CRPG's I would recommend the game after a price drop.

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Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

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