Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Imperial Edition Bundle

There's a lot to love about Pathfinder: Kingmaker, but you have to work for it - first and foremost by turning down the difficulty fairly severely. The default settings are withering even for those who are well familiar with the Pathfinder ruleset - and it's a ruleset that the game makes no real effort to teach you or explain. Once you've nerfed the enemies and done away with permadeath, you'll discover a long and satisfying traditional CRPG in the style of Baldur's Gate. The graphics are nice, the loot is plentiful (perhaps too plentiful - install a carrying capacity mod), the story makes sense, and the companions are mostly entertaining. Even with that, the game still has a fair share of glitches years after release - some of them game-breaking - and the kingdom management mechanics are stressful, poorly explained, and have the capacity to leave you in a walking-dead situation after dozens of hours of play. Plus if you don't play it right (or dare to roleplay) you'll miss the entire last chapter of the game. So like I say - there's a great game here, but you have to work for it.

I really should have liked this game. The concept is right up my alley! But it just doesn't work in so many ways. First off, it's *punishingly* difficult even on the lowest setting, due more to poor design choices than to anything the player's own skill can affect. If your character is anything other than a physical-combat-oriented beefpile, you will struggle to even complete the intro. And once you get past that... it just never lets up. Save scumming is your best friend throughout the entirety of the game, because it's simply impossible to progress without it. Eventually, after a big long fight to bring down a local tyrant, you take over their keep and establish yourself as the Baron. This could have been a campaign in and of itself, but no; that's the end of chapter 1. Now the *real* game begins, and everything is different. Suddenly the entire game is taken over by timed missions, resource management, and city building. The city building seems pretty cool, until you realize it has no bearing whatsoever on the rest of the game. The resource management would have been great if they had gone all the way with it, such as organizing party members not in your current party into their own party and sending them to complete quests you don't have time to do yourself, but that's never an option. And then we have the timed missions. There are a plethora of important quests that take up 2 weeks of game time, which get fast-forwarded through as soon as you start them, with no option to interrupt them if some crisis comes up 2 days into that 2-week period. I'll just come out and say it: the awful timed missions and timed events of the main story quest make the game utterly unplayable without a mod to circumvent them. This could have been an amazing game. But the polish and attention to detail was simply abysmal, leaving you wondering if they even playtested it at all before throwing it over the fence to us. Do yourself a favor and play Pillars of Eternity instead.

I wanted to like this game. I spent over 250 hours on it. Ultimately I uninstalled feeling very dissatisfied with the experience. This is one of those games that starts out fun and interesting...but the longer you play, the worse everything gets. Combat goes from rewarding to frustrating. The story is intriguing at first but rapidly spirals out of control, becoming tedious and hard to follow. The world seems huge and full of interesting places to explore when you begin the game...but before long, you find yourself slaving away at mandatory chores that eliminate all sense of freedom. Companions are all 1-dimensional stereotypes. Each one has a specific gimmick and it's the only thing they ever talk about. (For example, there is a nihilistic dwarf cleric who babbles nonstop about how everything in life is pointless. Listening to it is pure torture.) That's the problem with this game. The writing is very low quality. It's like they hired a 15-year-old kid to write his first epic novel. You're constantly presented with huge walls of exposition and reading them feels like homework. To illustrate my point, here's an example of how the writing goes wrong. After your first major victory in the game, your allies throw a banquet to celebrate your success. It's an exciting moment. You think the occasion is going to be a fun reward for all your hard work. Then the party starts and you discover that the only thing there is to do is listen to people ramble about politics and history. Some reward. I don't recommend this game. If you're looking for a good CRPG with excellent writing, try Baldur's Gate 1+2 or Planescape Torment. Cheaper and far superior.

Techinally, the game is ok. It looks okay, the music is fine, it works fine. But the balance is just terrible. Even on normal on level 6 you can get wiped in a matter of seconds just because enemies have +25 attack rolls and 70 damage crits or 30 damage normal hits. In the 1st chapter. Like, what? Have you even play tested your damn game?

So I think the way to look at this game and wrath of the righteous is like how'd you look at baldur's gate 1 and 2. Kingmaker, like baldur's gate 1, is a relatively low power level adventure. You run a kingdom and deal with all the issues that come with it. Things get a bit wacky once your halfway through the game, and that's where your first difficulty spike will probably be. Wrath on the other hand is like baldur's gate 2, high power, high stakes. You're fighting demons and demon lords. This also applies to the polish and quality of life features. Since this is owlcat's first game, it's missing a few things such as icons indicating spells you can copy and not having a rotatable camera. The major game breaking bugs have been ironed out at least, so you shouldn't have to worry about the game bricking itself mid play through. There's also the issue of timed quests, which IMO I think there's way too many of. Some of them don't even tell you there's a timer, so generally speaking if they tell you to hurry, it's probably timed. Don't waste your time on the timed main quests since if you fail those you fail the game. Overall, buy it on sale if you really like Pathfinder and really enjoyed wrath of the righteous. It's a lot easier than wrath when it comes to enemy encounters, that's for sure.