Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition

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.

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".