Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

The game was launched in a late beta state - full content, polished, fully finished but extremely buggy. After a few months of weekly - sometimes daily - updates, including during the winter holidays, the game has become stable and relatively bug-free. At the time of writing, there are still quest-coherence edge-case bugs in the later chapters. The fantastic post-launch support makes me forgive the sorry state in which the game was launched. The game itself is a faithful and detailed rendition of the Pathfinder system, with a great story and good-to-excellent writing. It reminds me of Baldur's Gate - the mix of dialogue interaction, tactical fighting, overarching story and a well-integrated keep management minigame. Some of the writing is a bit clunky, but only rarely. Overall, it is solid and sometimes excellent. Disclaimer: I am biased. The developer organised a livestream with co-writer Chris Avellone, where he answered a long-standing question I've had about the themes he uses in his writing.

Its a great game,story is good, lot of things to see and do,so far spent over 200 hours,and would like to try other styles of play also.BUT... Most of the sidequests are bugged,half the companion missions are bugged.Spending 200 hours only to figure out you cant finished lot of missions is really frustrating. The farther you progress the more bugs emerge, placeholder graphics,unnamed phantom residues of past enemys on map view.items disappearing after you unequip them.Infinite money and exp bugs if you want. There are bug fixes every second day,fixing numerous things,but it shows they know they pushed it out too early In a month or two,this game could be a great game,as it stands now,i wouldnt waste my time and money on it. Wait til its fixed and play then for more enjoyable experience

Let's start with the good stuff. The game is gorgeous, the soundtrack is great and the story as well. The set of rules integrated is also equally great. They did a tremendous job. I have been a backer since day one and was especially happy to be able to receive the game through GOG and not Steam. Negative points: -The game is utterly broken. It feels like a beta. I am in a game breaking bug, not my first one, where I can't leave a room, my progress was autosaved there, and nothing works (Janush / Companion question, permanently locked door scenario) -So many items don't work -So many typographical mistakes -Many instances of the story being affected by bugs -Poor level progressions interface -Poor guidelines on how to rule your kingdom. You never know clearly how to do something, and next thing you know undeads swarm it and you lost everything you built. It is so frustrating to play, that normally I would just start a new game since it was patched heavily from day 0. However, I still encounter so many game breaking bugs that restarting another 40h playthrough, only to still experience bugs, is very daunting. I might just shelf it and get back to it in 5 years. This is a shame. As the game was ambitious but poor quality control ruins the experience. The performance is also abysmal in terms of loading time. Just to get to your kingdom map you need to load a new screen. But then on your kingdom map, it tells you your new kingdom quest will start in the throne room. Ok, new loading screen. Oh, now your advisor tells you to go to the tavern. Gotta go back to the kingdom map to start the quest. Back to the throne room. Then to the city. Then to the tavern. That is like 5 loading screens for an 8 line dialog. Poor user experience. 8/10 story 7/10 characters 9/10 visual design for a crpg 8/10 rules and mechanics 2/10 execution 1/10 day one experience. Avoid until it is on sale in two years.

I'm playing with 1.0 damage, normal crits, normal monster, basically the rules as they should be played. I'm finding the game to be quite easy in that all you need to do to succeed in every encounter is to have a stealthy scout to have a look at the enemies stats, then buff accordingly, then charge in. And in longer fights, there are lots of disable spells to use. The problem with this game is the randomness. I've seen too many very high damage crits that oneshots my character from full hp forcing me to reload. A game that has back and forth play and counterplay where you eventually run out of resources and get killed, like a puzzle where you have to really think about how best to solve it, that's a difficult game. This game is not that. Getting oneshot by something because of a bad dice roll, that's not difficulty, that is randomness. I have played about 40hours, I think I'm around one third through the game. My experience of this game so far is that 90% of the encounters are too easy and requires zero thinking, just cast the same buffs and cast the same disable spells, then let AI auto-attack handle the rest. The other 10% can either be solved by reloading a few times until you get a good set of dice rolls, or coming back later when you have leveled up. I don't see how this can be enjoyable for anybody. Three paragraphs in and I haven't said anything about the story at all, yes, that is how forgettable this game's story is. It's just generic fantasy, there is nothing to say about it. So in summary, this game mistakes randomness for difficulty. Rolling a dice and getting a low number doesn't mean rolling dice is a difficult thing to do. Once you have learned the pathfinder ruleset, this game has as much difficulty as rolling dice, and you will enjoy it as much as rolling dice again and again by yourself. I didn't enjoy it, but I do understand how some people would enjoy it, after all gambling addiction is not a rare thing.

I'd like to start by stating that I haven't ran into a single bug during my entire session, thus if you are thinking to buy the game but are afraid of bug reviews, you can tick this fear off. I am impressed with how the game turned out given the fact it is the first game from Owlcat studious, making an RPG nowadays is no easy feat and though 1.5M from kickstarter may seem much, in reality it may not even be enough to pay team of good programmers for 2 straight years ! Pros & Cons: Pros: - No bugs in 2020 - Nicely structured class systems - Good story - Nice dubbing - Nice combination of adventuring and country management Cons: - Lack of companion's dialogue - End game challenges are just silly - Non-aparent game affecting choices - Stupid lockpicking I will start by saying the idea of game where player both adventures and rules his land is nice, not many RPG's have grasped that and those who did made it in a rudimentary fashion. I must say I truly enjoyed the class system, by selecting a Dragon blood sorcerer, I truly felt my character is progressing this way, especially by gaining these special feats and spells, some games are trying to make everything so balanced that they forget to include what being that character means ! I initially didn't learn what story will revolve around, all seemed to great compared to my character who on his own died quite easily, well until level 10 where things turned around and challenges became less about tactics and more about getting in a stealth mode close to the target and casting the spell. Companions in the game felt quite unique, I came to like Jubilost and Linzi, wish they had more dialogs. Another thing I should mention, if you don't like your companion's path, you can respecialize them or create your own.