Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition

The writing is honestly worse than even in Kingmaker, I mean its just atrocious, but the gameplay is quite a bit better and thats why I play these games in the end.

sadly, this is yet another "role-playing game" with little space for actual role-playing. there are few dialogue choices, and the ones that you do get are for choosing story paths. all the chaotic/evil decisions boil down to "I AM CRAZY AND I WILL KILL YOU", and then you kill them. the story is bad. it's dull, formulaic, and uncreative. the combat and character creation was great! pretty unbalanced but genuinely really fun. alas, i do not play RPGs for fun combat. that's something to add on top of a good story, not a replacement for one.

This game has it all: an excellent story, intriguing characters, staggering degrees of player agency, well-written dialogue, complex and challenging combat, diverse and creative build possibilities, and bugs, bugs, bugs galore. It has so many goddamned bugs, more than two years after release, that I can't bring myself to award it more than three stars. If I had a quarter for every time I had to reload a save, from hours previous because some bug or another made it impossible for me to progress, I'd have a refund. Additionally, some of the game design choices are downright sadistic; you'll see what I'm talking about once you get to Act IV (if you manage to last that long, given the goddamned bugs). I just cannot recommend this game in its current (presumably final) state because of how intensely frustrating it can be, and not because it's challenging. Play at your own risk, knowing that at any moment you may be unable to advance for reasons beyond you control.

Regarding the EULA... You can opt out of the reporting that was included in the EULA that everyone is upset about. Every game company asks you to send them information about your machine. For some reason people don't like that they want to learn what geographical audience they are catoring to. Well just opt out of the reporting... I read another review where they said you go from a random guard to a hero out of nowere within an hour into the game. They must not have been paying attention to the in game dialog. There is a story driven reason for your meteoric rise (you were never just a random nobody). The game itself... I'm a huge fan of the Heros Of Might and Magic series so it was awesome to see them build that style of campaign play into the game. If that's not your cup of tea, it's completely optional. The story has been fantastic and the characters really well done. Graphics are top notch for the style. RNG is still a pretty major factor so there have been some battles where I got obliterated 2-3 times and then I got a lucky roll early and wiped the enemy like it was nothing but overall I've had a lot of fun with combat. The flexibility with class and story development is out of this world. By the time I got to the last chapter of my first play through I was already planning how I wanted to do things in my 2nd and 3rd playthroughs. I've played through the full Baldur's Gate series probably a dozen or more times as it's always been one of my favorites. This game has taken it's place on that shelf.

Each time I return to the game, I cannot help but have a good time. It is simply the best Classic RPG to date in my opinion, and has nearly unlimited replayability. I know some reviews make comments about the ELUA agreement, but I wanted to make it clear that after playing through Kingmaker, and following the developers during the making of this game via livestreams, I can say they've done their best to make an excellent game and they deserve the benefit of the doubt as far as motives are concerned. Their long time support for this game is a testament to that, and I cannot recommend a better game in the genre. As far as being a flawed game, all games are flawed to some extent, and I don't believe there are any flaws in this game that ruin the experience. I'm actually quite impressed with the level of QoL in the game, and I would compare it to the likes of Grim Dawn in this area.