Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

1. The story: nothing to write home about, with the exception of a few quests like "The price of curiosity" which is one of the best quests I have ever seen in a videogame, I literally could not stop laughing for 5 minutes traight. 2. Build crafting: amazing, it has enough classes and archetypes to keep you up all day long thinking about competitive/fun/whacky/broken or straight up janky party compositions. Most of those builds will never see the light of day because the game is very long and most people will not commit to a 3rd or 4th playthrough. 3. Music: cool and immersive tracks... PAPAPAN PAN PAN PAAANNN. Yup, the main menu track hits you right in the epic feels. 4. Length: the game is on the lenghty side, took me about 270 hours to complete 2 playthroughs in Hard difficulty. 5. Progression: enjoyable, if you take your time to explore and complete side quests it always feels like you are doing fine, no encounter feels out of your reach at any given moment. Lots of cool equipment to support different play styles throughout the entire game. 6. Kingdom management: somewhat interesting and fun but it becomes tedious. Takes at least one playthrough to fully grasp all the mechanics and properly manage your kingdom. 7. Quality of life: everything feels fine until you play Wrath of the Righteous and realize where Kingmaker is lacking. Most notoriously being unable to rotate the camera. 8. Performance: decent most of the time with the ocasional fps drop during turn transitions (especially latter in the game), quickly switching between turn based and real time usually fixes all problems. Conclusion: I really enjoyed it and I strongly recommend it to all rpg lovers out there, if you made it all the way down here I guarantee you will enjoy the game. The perfect cRPG would have Pathfinder's game deisgn with Pillars of Eternity's story

I really tried to like this game, but the amount of bugs makes it impossible. I stopped counting how many times I actually had to edit save files just to advance through the main story. On top of it, towards the end of the game there are huge annoying balance issues and absolutely idiotic game mechanics (like the game permanently kills half of your companions chosen randomly destroying all group synergy your built for the past 150+ hours). 1 star since this game is still in beta, and you can not treat people who paid full price like free beta testers.

Let's get this out of the way: The game is a big challenge and there are some features - RPG system and the Kingdom management - that rub some people the wrong way and that is perfectly fine and there is nothing to do about it. So I'm just talking from the point of view, obviously, of someone who enjoys challenges, has at the moment occasionally time slots in life where this epic challenge of a game fits, who enjoys a game where you can multiclass at every level-up, where you can make a lot of various kinds of adjustments to difficulty of the game, who doesn't stress about the kingdom management, instead doesn't mind making mistakes... And there is save-scumming if I make a mistake I'd rather undo... It's not really a tough game, honestly, if you have the time to learn it. What really keeps me going is how much I enjoy the game world and the characters both bad and good... And it's not of course always easy to know which is which... The characters seem to me quite original, it's just not obvious from the start... It's like getting to know a stranger, little by little... It may seem the other person is one-dimensional, but more one has patience... There may be more to it, than meets the eye... Now I'm thinking a Neil Young song... Where was I? Yeah so the pacing... I'm still getting origin story quests added as possibilities in my quest journal, and I've played over 60 hours... And I'm not even talking about being leveled-up enough to be able to go and start completing these quests... But yes, I have to admit the game can be confusing. I'll admit anything, as long as I can also claim that this is for me, one of the best games I've played... And I've played through quite a bit. Not in the hundreds, but still a lot! :P

Being a fan of both, RPGs as well as building simulations, Pathfinder: Kingmaker (PK) sounded like the perfect game for me. Becoming king in an high fantasy setting and shaping the future of your country and character should be an intriguing combination after all. Regrettably, the game's flaws prevent you from truly enjoying your time in the "Stolen Lands". In the following i will focus on the kingdom building aspects due to the restricted number of words i am allowed to use. My biggest issue however is the kingdom building aspect of this game. Instead of creating vivid towns you only build buildings on three different archetypes of layout grids. The buildings you build have no effect on the world expect for passive secondary kingdom stats like "Relationship" boosts, which in turn allows you to train your advisors which allows you to claim more land, build more, train more, etc. Its a pertetuum mobile of standarized repeating actions. Meanwhile when you visit those settlements with your party they will always look and offer the same, no matter their development. As a critique without advice for improvement wouldn't be fair i will try to offer ways in which i believe his could be improved. Firstly, use unique locations from the map as groundwork for your towns. If their is a story relevant trading post then build the village around it. Add quests to turn it into a center of trade. make each settlement unique instead of a copy paste procedure. Secondly, tie world map improvement of your town to personal experience of your characters. Build a tavern in the city, be allowed to rest there. build a shop, trader pops up. Build a smithy, traders starts to deal in arms and armour as well... All in all, the game was a dissapointment becasue even though I invested a lot of time into it i never really felt invested in the story and the characters and that makes this game below average.

I've been playing isometric CRPGs since the original Fallout. I remember drooling over previews of the original Baldur's Gate more than 20 years ago. I played my way through Pillars of the Earth and backed Deadfire. Pathfinder Kingmaker is the closest fit to my gaming tastes of any game released since the Infinity Era. Yes it had bugs; it had a lot of bugs at the start but even they weren't enough to hide the fact this game hit all my CRPG buttons: Companions with personalities and relationships D20 mechanics Moral choices A story that let me explore rather than forcing me down a railroad. DEPTH Campaign length: I've played 250 hours already and won't be surprised to play 250 more. Yes, the difficulty can scale pretty high and some find that off-putting, and that's not even mentioning the bugs it started with. At the same time, Owlcat has been very good about fixing bugs and they have done wonders in decreasing load times. I have a fast NVME SSD and the first versions were just terrible for load times, but now it's no worse than other games of the genre. If you like western style isometric RPGs you can get lost in it for untold hours, and that's what I want most from any game. Hours of enjoyment.