Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

I'm in agreement with the othe reviews, this game seriously needs to be fixed. I'm all for a challenging game, but when you're missing 90% of the time to the enemies 90% hit rate and they are doing 15 points of damage (to your 5 points) at the very start of the game, you know something is wrong. Until more patches come out that fix the balancing and doesn't rely on a roll of a dice on whether you created the acceptable character the developers wanted you to make in order to make it through, avoid this game and stick to well put together games like POE II.

I really wanted to share my opinion on this flawed gem - the detailed review with screenshots and all was published on RPGWatch: https://www.rpgwatch.com/show/article?articleid=466 Here's the snippet of my full review: To my surprise, Kingmaker far exceeded my expectations, and provided me with more than 100 hours of immensely fun gameplay. I was given a plethora of options to create a character of my desire to explore the vivid and rich world filled with colourful and mysterious characters, and was captivated by the amazing story-telling. However, the game is not without its flaws – Owlcat Games appeared to have bitten off more than they could chew with their ambitious first project – a buggy release, mediocre kingdom management system and atrocious end game design marring an engaging and deep game. A furious post-release patching schedule has seen the most glaring technical issues resolved, allowing players to experience the full scope of Owlcat Games vision. For me, Kingmaker is the true spiritual successor of Baldur’s Gate, a feat no other games have achieved up until now. Pros: +Fun and complex character building and combat +Lots of meaningful choices and consequences +Fantastic story telling +Well written characters +Innovative camping system +Highly customisable difficulty settings to suit different play-style Cons: -Buggy release -Kingdom system that lacks player feedback, and feels separate to the main game -Terrible end game experience -Several and long loading screens Pathfinder: Kingmaker is an extremely complex and fun cRPG despite all its flaws, and I highly recommend it to all cRPG fans, especially for those who yearn for a true Baldur’s Gate like experience.

Let me get this out of the way straight up, the game has some bugs and some parts of it are subpar *ahem kingdom management. But the meat of the game - the roleplaying and adventuring, is superb. The char creation is fantastic, your companions are interesting and they all have unique personalities and the story is written quite well - far better than any other modern RPG I've played. Most of these types of games have me just auto clicking the good choices everytime they appear but in this game, I actually picked evil choices every now and then because the game actually got me emotionally invested and dammit I need revenge. So 5 stars for a game thats broken me out of my comfort zone and actually made me think and feel something

This game uses the ruleset of Paizos Pathfinder RPG and gives you many different choices during the dialogues. The pacing during the chapters is at the right speed and you get always something to do. There are different modes the game switches through, while you play. When you travel through your land, you get to see the big Map, where you select the direction or the waypoint you want to travel to. When you reach a certain waypoint or get ambushed during your travels you enter the exploring screen. If you got to fight during exploration the fight initiates instantly and your movement gets turnbased if the option is activated. The turnbased movement has to be used if you play at normal or higher difficulty. In several situation you get dialogues at which you get certain options to select, which affect your alignment and can change it if you often select decisions of this type of alignment. Some dialogue options are choosable if you have certain alignments or if you pass certain skill checks. The kingdom management screen enables you to build buildings in your villages, react on events and to skip days, so that events complete. It is important to know for new players, that there is a button "Y" (eye) with which you get certain information about your opponents. These informations are absolutely important, because you get to know the immunities and damage reductions of an enemy. It is also important to save every now and then, because the game is sometimes crashes, espacially if you use mods. One thing that would be great for a second replay would be the possibility to skip days until the next event would happen, or to autoassign advisors for events. With this options the kingdom management would be more fluid. I would also like the option to just find money instead of simple weapons, which I would just sell for money. Thank you for this great game and more than 500 hours of gameplay. Please make more games like this.

Being an advent D&D and Pathfinder player for many years, I knew I absolutely had to have this game. From the description of the game, it seemed like it was going to offer an immense amount of options to gameplay and character creation; In the end, Owlcat Games delivered exactly that! I know a lot of these reviews (some have age on them now are negative because of bugs. True, the game had/has bugs, but I will challenge you with this question: How many games of this magnitude are bug free? What a lot of these negative reviewers don't bother telling you is that Owlcat, almost bi-weekly, releases some sort of update, bug fixing patch to the game. I just finished the game after an astounding 300+ hours on the main story! How many solo games do you know that can offer that immense amount of content? Very few. Below is my list of pros and cons, take from it what you will: Pros + *Nice graphics *Nice fitting music *Highly customizable characters true to the Pathfinder ruleset *Enormous game, hundreds of hours of gameplay if you search for every nook and cranny like I do *Good play style, live turn based action with pause (perfect for this genre) *Many updates, including a couple of FREE DLCs! *Good balance on encounters. Some were obviously tougher, but I never felt I had no chance *For price, this game is a HUGE bargain! Cons - *In game hints/directions can be vague/incomplete. Nothing a quick google can't fix. I would compare it to an original Everquest questing system AT TIMES. Sometimes it leads you to the target. *May still be some bugs and gliches. But, its a BIG game and the devs are constantly updating this game. *So far, the DLCs, even the pay to gain DLCs are fairly small. I give this game 8.5/10 and it is easily 5 stars for the price vs content (and thats at full price! With a sale it would be higher!) If you are an avid fan of Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, or any other classic in this genre, then this game is most certainly for you!