Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

CRPG's have been my life for decades. From Infinity Engine games like Baldurs Gate, Torment and the like, moving to Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age games, all the way to modern CRPG's such as Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny. I've played them all to death. Pathfinder: Kingmaker is like a breath of fresh air, scented with nostalgia. It plays in so many ways like the CRPG's of old, yet brings so much new to the table as well. Here's the key features of the game that tick all the boxes for me: * Great Story * Great Characters * Great Music * Great Gameplay * Innovative travel and kingdom management * INSANE replay value You play with a party of 6 adventurers in the modified 3.5 DnD ruleset, very similar to the old Infinity games and NWN series. DnD rules aside, it looks very much like the newer PoE games and the like. Beautiful graphics with an isometric camera angle. The biggest difference however, is the advanced overhead map travel and resting system, as well as kingdom management. Traveling on a big map, running into random encounters and discovering points of interest isn't new to CRPG's (most recently Pillars of Eternity 2 offers a very similar thing), however what sets Kingmaker's travel system apart is its high number of locations and the detailed encumbering and resting system. Traveling takes a lot of time and you need rations to feed your party when resting. You can hunt for them, but that takes even more time. Or you can buy rations, but they weigh a lot and slow your travel time, requiring you to rest more often. Careful balance is needed. Resting can involve many activities from cooking to guard duty, hunting, fighting and more. Kingdom management is almost a whole other game in itself. A mix of 4x city building and random event management. If you loved NWN2's or PoE's stronghold mechanics, you'll be blown away by this Kingdom Sim. The game has some bugs as of writing this review, but devs are releasing patches almost daily to fix them.

One might ask why I'm giving it a 5 stars even with all of the gamebreking bugs? Becauuse they are fixing them with few patches every week. And is really great RPG game. It's the most close expirince to real pen and paper RPG game, that I have so far.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is a great CRPG combined with kingdom management. It is - however - hampered by some usability and user experience issues. The character building options are plentiful and fun. Difficulty options are plentiful and detailed. I'm comfortably playing on normal and getting a relatively smooth experience. Big fights might require a reload or two. You can run into monsters you are unable to handle and might have to come back to. Other fights might require you to find the right tactic, but hints are provided, if you read the texts. The story so far (I am in chapter 3 as of writing this review) is tied to your kingdom. It follows certain fantasy tropes, but has been fun so far. The companions are, as expected, a weid and varied bunch, although they won't be winning any awards for outstanding creativity. They are well-written and their personal quests do a good job of endearing them to the player. Now to the bad points: User experience and usability are severely hampered by the loading times combined with a lack of shortcuts to avoid unnecessary loading screens. Load times on my slightly aged gaming PC (game installed on an SSD) can be up to a minute long. Combine that with unnecessary loading screens in kingdom management makes this game a candidate for having a podcast on in the background, just to pass the time while you wait. A lot of this annoyance could be fixed by adding direct ways to access the world travel map from your throne room and the kingdom management screen. Integrating the town building into the same unity scene as kingdom management would also be great (but could, of course, be a lot harder). Optimisation of the necessary loading screens is also a must. Unity is known to be bad at this, but any time taken off would greatly reduce frustration. Overall a hesitant recommendation. If you have a hankering for a good but flawed crpg right now, get it. If you want a smoother experience, wait for patches.

Is Kingmaker without flaw? Definitely not. However, the game has a tremendous depth in story and design. The developer may have rushed the release but has been eager to fix all issues with a string of patches. I have been playing fro 40+ hours and are still in chapter 2. If you like the classic cRPGs or tabletop RPG go and get this gem.

This game had me hooked. This review is for those of you who know Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights and are thinking about this game: Get the game. I played through 12 hours of it before I realised I had built a fairly useless character, and the game got very difficult as a result. So I started up a new character, and got further before hitting the same plateau. With my third character, I thought the game was bugged beyond repair and just ruining itself for me for no reason. Turns out, I had been skipping through a lot of tutorials, and a good bout of googling and old fashioned logical thinking had me working out most of my kinks and straightening my campaign back out. This game is not cruel. You will need to google stuff, you will need to revise your thinking, and your choices matter to a point where one might think the game is being needlessly pedantic. If a quest is worded as an urgent quest, such as "Save them before it is too late", then count on the quest failing because of your tardiness. Do not tarry. Save your game often, think about your choices, plan ahead and enjoy this game. It is both a fantasy campaign and a kingdom simulator, and it is absolutely epic. The bad: The game loads slowly, and the loadscreens are often inconvenient. My fix? Write down possible quests and kingdom issues on a sheet of paper, and consider your options during the load times. This is particularly annoying in the kingdom navigator/throneroom-areas. Still: Great game. Just buy it.