Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Imperial Edition Bundle

Kingmaker wants to be a CRPG in the vein of Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale, but fails on every count. It fails to explain basic systems to the player, fails to explain how it is different from decades of learned concepts, and immediately puts the player on the clock, never letting up through the end. Where every Infinity Engine title wants you to strategically handle encounters, consume resources, and then rest to replenish them, Kingmaker wants you to avoid gameplay at all costs, and hoard everything until you are close to death. There are dozens of better CRPGs, and you should play one of them instead.

A DnD game with all the terrible mechanics of DnD (memorisation, too many things depending on sheer luck, the terrible saving throw-system), without the writing and direction of great crpgs like Pillars of Eternity, or Baldur's Gate. The kingdom-management is great in theory, but a confusing mess in practice. The questing and the Journal is all over the place, you go to a location multiple times, the Journal never says where a quest-location actually is. Terrible, terrible game-design, they need to learn how to design a Journal and questing so they actually help the players instead of confusing them more. It does worth £15, but not any more. If you like isometric crpgs, play Pillars of Eternity, or the second Torment game instead!

I started the game, you can't build your team. You build one character and get wiped. You meet people along the way and get wiped with them. So like, I built a Wizard. you start the game you are beyond weak. Basically, you can't kill a fly. Seriously, a fly would butcher a team of 10 characters in this game. You meet a bard, then a barbarian who is strong hitting but with 15 HP she's not long for this world. So while you hit for 1-10 dmg. Any enemy in this game hits 18-20 dmg. While you hit 3 times a year. Every enemy hits 80%. You have magic missles that do 1-6 dmg. They have 2 archers shooting twice doing 7-15 each shot. I tried. I really tried. Why can't I build my team? So at some point in the game I have the following characters: Wizard, Bard, Cleric, Wizard, Wizard/Fighter, Barbarian, Paladin(?) 5 spell casters. What am I going to do with 5 porcelain spell casters? One archer kills my entire party in 2 turns. There are 3 archers 2 wizards and a boss who summons a wolf every turn. I'm throwing mud at them. My barbarian is getting gangbanged my paladin/fighter/shield-maden is swatting at flies, and 5 spell casters together can't start a fire with matches. You encounter a pig? You are dead. You encounter a spider? You are dead. You want to rest? Oh yeah the quests are on timers. Rest away, enjoy that. Just frustrating. You can't have fun on a timer. I want to explore, grind, level up, come back stronger. But I feel like I can't. It doesn't recommand a level for the quests, so you don't know if you are ready to go do a certain quest or you need to grind more. But, a blind, one legged bunny can kill 30 adventurers, so grind where? Maybe you can step on ants somewhere until you lvl up. Also, the camera doesn't pan around. So if you go under trees, you can't see. This game is annoying as hell.

Pros: - great system, deep, interesting and challenging - looks pretty :) - nice music, suits the game very well - great gameplay, once understood - modern story telling and sometimes it feels that RL subjects snuck in, overall very nicely done though - dev team seems to be fast about fixing reported issues, thumbs up Cons: - steep learning curve already at normal difficulty, I had to dig up a "manual" of the pathfinder tabletop to understand some of the game aspects. It's not all entirely new, but to a non-PnP person this can be rather confusing at times - tho I am tempted to try harder modes once I fully grasp the game - at first loading times are ok even if it does it a lot (even more so if you keep dying hah...), but once past a certain point in the story it feels as if the loading times to go from scene to scene doubled :/ (I tried a SSD and NVMe, currently it sits on my NVMe drive) Left out minor bugs that will most likely be adressed. (missing text variables in the english version being printed as <null> or <binding something>) Overall: After the first few hours (13-15h), I felt like I wasted a few euros here as it was a frustrating reload mess (I started with challenger, should have heed the warning hah...), but now I rerolled my third time and played that third reroll for another 12 hours and having a blast (after I read up on the mechanics and some rules of the game) and it's pretty great. I am probably still making plenty of misstakes or have missconceptions about how some things work, but I enjoy the challenge. Would buy again. :)

TL;DR: Why are you still reading this? BUY AND PLAY! To summarize, Chris Avellone is part of it. Inon Zur is part of it. Using Pathfinder rules. I've bought the Imperial Edition of this game FOUR times. One for me, and the others as a gift for my tabletop RPG mates. As of today, among just three of us (the other is currently unavailable to play it), we have a combined 155 hours of play. I REGRET NOTHING. Owlcat Games did a gorgeoous, Baldur's Gate-like game, using the Pathfinder rules, and a Pathfinder campaign. The graphics are beautiful, as is the music. And the story is immersive. Being able to both play the team, and also rule over a savage land, and make decisions both as a group leader with your companions, and as a barony ruler, is awesome. This game has (almost) the right combination of combat gameplay, story gameplay, rulership gameplay, exploration, intrigue. For my taste, it is a bit low on companions/roleplay gameplay (I was spoiled by BioWare's Mass Effect/Dragon Age dialogs, and characters, sorry), but, well, the recipe is almost perfect. This needs to happen again. I'm still at 80 hours of play, and I already want all of them to make next game. Tell me they'll work on a Mass Effect game, and TAKE MY MONEY!!! P.S.: There are bugs, but nothing critical, and most of them were resolved in the following days after the release (kudos to the developers!) P.P.S.: You CAN provide a custom portrait for your character. The option is too small, and easy to miss. This would be THE ONLY gripe I truly have with this game. Some of my friends missed this, and now have to continue their gameplay with the old game-provided portraits (which are cool but...). WE NEED to be able to change/update our PC portrait at any moment, PLEASE. P.P.P.S.: Like Pathfinder, this game is rich in rules, enabling a lot of customization (changing character classes, etc.). But we need more. We need additional classes and races. Arcanists, Dhampirs, etc..