Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition

The Good: - Great art design and voice acting - Enormous build variety, between nearly two hundred classes (including sub-classes) plus the mythic paths - Great character writing and dialog - Outstanding player agency The Neutral: - Direct adaptation of P&P Pathfinder rules, meaning lots of RNG, obscure sub-systems, and overwhelming options for new players - Mythic Paths are integrated well into the plot, but at the same time their progression leaves much to be desired - Highly moddable - Highly customizable difficulty options - Option for either real time or turn based combat The Bad: - Difficulty spikes. The devs defended this by citing that, since the player can control and coordinate a full team, and can reload saves, the difficulty had to be tuned up. Unfortunately, this leads to intermittent difficulty spikes that require either meticulous min-maxing, tedious pre-buffing, or save-scumming. All three of those are magnitudes worse on higher difficulties. - The crusade mechanic is fine on paper, but in practice, it's more of a slog serving as a time-waster. - Loading screens. E.g: Let's say the player is in the command room, and needs to take a fortress to progress the story. Going into crusade mode is a load, then the battle is a separate load, then coming back to the command room is a load, followed by loading into the town, from whence the player can load into the world map, where they could then move the party to the destination and load into the map. Even on an SSD, all of this loading can add hours to the total playtime. - Bugs. Countless bugs, both in combat, and more damningly, in the story. Quests sometimes just don't trigger, or flags don't get flipped, locking the player out of certain options. This is most pronounced in the true ending, where one or two broken flags can ruin a hundred hours long play-through. Mods can help, but they shouldn't be required. Overall, still a great game, but it's also startlingly unpolished, despite being "enhanced".

I backed the game on kickstarter as I love Kingmaker and the Pathfinder system. I just played the first few minutes (!) and want to share my experience so far. -The game runs fine on my not so highend system. The graphics are pretty nice. -The intro scene is impressive. -The voice acting is very good so far, character design is superb. -The story is interesting so far, the setting is nice. -The camera somehow always is either a bit too close or a bit too far away. -The tutorial nicely integrates into the gameplay. -Pathinder offers a lot of options and rules and backstory. It is very hard to follow every detail. But I think the game does a good job here. Thumbs up!

I have a rig that breezes the game requirements. All the files seem to be in order upon installation. And yet I can't even arrive to the main menu UI as I get stuck on a perma load upon booting the game. I have no in-game experience. Nothing. I have managed to find some reports using google that show EA users had this problem in early May. How this has not been addressed is beyond me. Very disappointing. I don't like to leave reviews as a rule but this is quite literally unplayable as it stands now.

STORY & ROLE-PLAYING I think the greatest aspect of this game is how reactively it is written. Through the Mythic Path system, your game experience can vary quite dramatically, both in terms of gameplay as well as in story. Contrary to similar claims made by some other games, your choices in Pathfinder truly do matter a great deal. The dialogue also allows a great deal of defining the role you play. The main baddies are also mysterious and well-written. It's not as well written as Planescape Torment, but still it's really great. COMPANIONS Chris Avellone co-wrote this game. And it shows. Expect smart subversions of stereotypes, and interesting and sometimes even philosophical dialogue. The companions are strange, in a good way. You may love some, you may hate some, as it should be. COMBAT I usually play CRPGs for the story, role-playing, and the companions, not for the combat (i.e. I like games Planescape Torment, Disco Elysium, and Pentiment). So I was somewhat hesitant to play a combat-heavy game like Pathfinder WOTR. I am happy to say that I actually liked the combat. Owlcat made the good decision to fully allow for both RTWP and turn-based combat; Pathfinder WOTR excels at both. PUZZLES & MECHANICS The puzzles are poorly designed. An important part of puzzles is that certain clues must be given such that the player can figure it out, yet at the same time the player feels smart for solving the puzzles. The game handles this very poorly. I haven't played with crusade management, so I can't comment on that. CONCLUSION So, although the game is not perfect, I can very safely say that the positives greatly overshadow the negatives. I recommend this game to lovers of reactive CRPGs. Now, there have been some reviewers saying that the game has spyware and the EULA is shady. This is nonsense. The EULA is comparable to any other game, and there is no spyware of any kind (I ran all my anti-virus and anti-malware software on the game, and no hits were found).

If you loved BG3, but found it a bit too easy, a bit too thin in terms of content (lol) and like to read, then WotR will be your Game! First Playthrough was around 150hours, but I took my time. Multiple Playthroughs are very recommended, because of the different Paths your Character can Progress. Be it becoming a Legen, an Angel. a Demon or a literal Manifestation of the Universes Order, the possibilities are incredible. Played it turn-based and had a great time. Not as polished as BG3, but for the Price, you get a great value!