Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous - Enhanced Edition

Tried it for the first time a few months ago, I heard about the series before but was too busy to put my hands on it. The game is amazing, graphics are amazing, dialogs, soundtrack.. I highly recommend it, even if like me you don't quite have the time to finish it :)

I've played many games that had flawed gameplay but the story still carried it. This is not one of them. THE VISUALS: surprisingly good, even though this is a full 3d game. Weapons, armor, character models don't look horrible. THE GAMEPLAY: baffling. Confusing UI - with a ruleset as complex as Pathfinder 1.0 perhaps a lot more thought could go into the UI. There's too much happening and too many time-dependent events, too many mind-affecting spells, and a terrible implementation of RTwP. I don't know if a companion AI editor exists - it was a feature in Infinity Engine/Obsidian games, but apparently the default caster build in this game is with a crossbow so they don't run into an army of enemies with their staves and wands and get themselves killed. Seems like the developers tried to cram as many features as they could into the game without taking the time to streamline them. This is a game that would benefit from turn-based combat and better designed encounters. THE STORY: without going into spoilers, this is fanfic level stuff, characters having tantrums in the middle of a war council, the pacing of mythic choices being all over the place, and the overall plot is the quality of an average homemade tabletop campaign. I understand it is hard to retain focus with a game of this scale, but maybe scaling the game back a little would be a better idea. THE BOTTOM LINE: Wrath of the Righteous is a game where the ambitions of the developers far exceeded their skill at making a game. I genuinely tried to like this game, but by the end of Act 2 I was essentially sleepwalking from one objective to the other and knew it was time to stop and let go of it, rather than waste more hours at something I clearly was not enjoying.

This game is significantly better than Kingmaker. It is more polished, easier to learn, prettier, & has better story/characters. The music is very good although some tracks are a little short. The spell effects are outstanding. The characters are mostly very interesting and have good voice actors. IMO the biggest thing this game lacks is more voice acting. Divinity Original Sin 2 was fully voiced and that made the game so much better. The lack of voice acting in this game can make it feel like work to play. If you are tired, trying to read tiny text to follow the story is not fun. It's work. Another problem is that the game has long load times when entering areas. The environments are nothing special by today's standards so I consider the long load times unacceptable. Apparently this game has spyware which is terrible. My advice is to block the executable from having internet access in the Windows firewall or run the game as a user with no internet access if on Linux. Normal combat in this game is done very well in both turn based or real time mode. The combat you do with armies however is a poorly done and not fun. Unless you are a huge D&D fan, this game is nowhere as good as DOS2 particularly in terms of presentation & accessibility. But among D&D games, I believe this is currently the best one.

If you enjoy old school style cRPGs like BG, NWN, and PoE then there's a very good chance you will like this game. There is an extreme level of content and customization for your character and party, it is a bit overwhelmeing. I've basically been playing this game exclusively for the past year since release and still enjoy remaking characters and trying different paths. Learning the system and what the game expects from your party to be successful is part of the process. I started with custom normal difficulty and now play on pure core. I dont recommend upping difficulty until you really understand the game, it will lull you into a false sense of security and then throw some nice stuff at you that you havent seen RIP. Yes there are still a few annoying bugs, and they will likely have new ones with major updates, but the team always works through it.

At first it was constant screen flickering and freezes and now it won't run at all, even after reinstalling. And yes, my system easily meets the recommended specs.