Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition

As of this review I am unable to play the game, simply because of crashes, bugs and the horrible optimazation, I am not an expert in pc specs but my pc is pretty good and can run Baldurs gate 3 with a steady 55-6ofps, but this game struggles on nearly any map. I do belive there is a good game here, but it is simply unplayable atm.

I have so many mixed feelings about this game. On one hand, I love the game, there is a lot they got right. On the other hand, it feels terribly optimized, and poorly balanced. The Good: Fun plot, fun characters, and many choices feel very impactful. They added a lot of new abiltiies and feats that once again are a blast to play with and try new builds. The pacing in this game was A LOT better than kingmaker and so is the leveling experience. World map travel and all the side games were much less of a chore and I found I enjoyed them well enough. They added a lot of detailed text information to make it easier to understand Pathfinder rules which was a great addition (needs more!). The Bad: Poorly optimized. The game is littered with bugs. The UI is annoyingly laggy and my powerful PC is juicing to run this on medium / medium-high settings. I played most the game on Core. With that said, most of the fights were very challenging but possible. Yet, I consistently ran into random fights that absolutely destroyed me. I am no expert in pathfinder but I still consider myself a power gamer and did a lot of min-maxing with respecs to get incredibly powerful builds. Despite that, there were some fights I had to turn down to daring and then some fights I had to turn down even more. Despite that i'd still give this game a 3 stars with the potential to be 4- 4.5. If you enjoyed kingmaker I think you'll enjoy this even more. Just give it some time to get the polish it needs...hopefully :)

I did 2 complete runs, around 200 hours each, first with an Azata mythic build up to the end, the second with a Trickster/Legend build. And I know I'll do another one when all the DLCs will be out. WotR offers an incredible replay value, both in terms of character builds and story, and might have become the best CRPG I've played so far. Game gives the choice between Realtime and Turn-based combat and it's the way to go. Realtime mode offers some of the most intense encounters I've faced in an isometric game (Core difficulty), and I was thrilled. It has moments of greatness, like the introduction to the Azata mythic path in Desna's temple, such an arresting song. The only thing that was missing is a complete crafting system; it's limited to scrolls, potions and a few items. If there is a third Pathfinder adventure, I hope Owlcat will focus on the exploration. The crusade mechanics was fine, but nowhere as good as your party exploring, fighting and looting.

It does still have bugs, including game breaking ones. How much importance this has and how excusable it is given the size and scope of the game is subjective, but it is a flaw that has to be kept in mind. For a fan of old style rpgs though, it's godsend with almost infinite character creation combinations and diverse mythic paths that offer lots of variety to the way you can handle quests/areas of the game and different endings/ending slides (unfortunately some are way more fleshed out than others). To my personal taste however, I found most of the NPCs to be luckster/not making any sense, and for a game that big, you are limited in your choices, although just like in Kingmaker, you can still create your own party members similarly to IWD, making the game way easier in the process although you would me missing out on a lot of NPCs quests and experience. The difficulty balance is a bit of a hit and miss, especially depending on your class choice as MC/whether you go with the story NPCs or your own. Overall I found Core to be well balanced as long as you know what you are doing, with a couple of sudden spikes in a couple of areas, and a sudden dip as you get closer to the peak of your own power (not necessarily a bad thing as you do want to feel powerful in a game like this). The writing (or NPCs as mentioned earlier) is not at the level of other classics of the past, but it's not too bad either to the point of being detrimental to your enjoyment. (There are a few moments/characters that feel really off but they are few and far between.) I give it overall a 4/5 and can recommend it to any fan of old school rpgs.

Amazing story, BUT gameplay is terrible year after release: bug, where dead ragdolls stand up, imbalanced enemies, messy items that spam inventory, hours of loading and party resting to get from point A to point B and much more fun. Just buy Divinity Original Sin or Baldurs gate, that's how proper mechanics should work.