Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

Ok, maybe the game was broken at launch, but at the time of this review, after having spent 2 dozens hour in it, I can say it's one of the best RPG around. Everything polished, the campaign looks ginormous there's some real roleplay bits in it :) (not just bashing) If you enjoy games like pillars of eternity 2, you should love this.

The great: graphics; atmosphere; character development/writing; the whole first portion of the game is really outstanding! The good: Interesting little "choose-your-own-adventure" moments add spice; combat mechanics are mostly solid The bad: spikey difficulty; large section of the game has a "kingdom-management" element that is truly un-fun. Travel & resting mechanics are truly awful.

I say this as someone familiar with the tabletop version: this game is terrible. If any DM was to run their game like this, they would quickly find no one is willing to play their table. It's just too obvious the goal isn't for those playing to have fun with the one running, just cause as much frustration and TPKs as possible. And this is for the difficulty labeled as "most similar" to the tabletop. You need to min-max and optimize heavily or you shouldn't even bother trying. Being fair, the first part game is decent until you get your kingdom. Everything to do with that is poorly explained, mostly up to chance, and doesn't effect the rest of the game in any way except negatively. You either have good luck, and nothing happens; or you have bad luck and enter a death spiral to a quick and unavoidable game over. The usually hidden/hard to find timers for game over don't help. The story/writing is... not terrible. The voice acting leave something to be desired though. I freely admit some of this may be lingering resentment from having pre-ordered. But I recently re-installed, and while there had been bug-fixes (though even with that there were several I ran into); it had not improved enough to recommend to anyone. So, with the improvements in mind, I give this game three more stars than I would have given at release.

2020 review I have watched the game since release and waited until the DLCs were out and the reported bugs were low before finally buying it. I wasn't impressed as there are still plenty of lock-ups and glitches. Complaints about long loading screens are justified and much of the game seems like it's intentionally wasting time to stretch out the reported hours of game play. Watching your game piece slide around the map slowly. Fatigue from travel causing you to have to rest. A stupid fetch-quest ends up taking 5 days of in game time because, as a king you apparently walk everywhere until you get to the point you can build a few teleportation circles to at least teleport to your own cities. Then walk/rest/walk. **SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON** Even with that I enjoyed about the first 2/3 of the game then got bored with it. The final two chapters were just painful to play. I ended up turning the difficulty to "story mode" just to get through it faster and end the suffering. Just endless waves of meaningless mass combat, not something that Pathfinder rules are good at, that require a ridiculous amount of micro-management and repeated buff/fight/rest cycles. All that could possibly be forgiven if they didn't screw up your party. I did ever companion quest except for one. I got invested in their little stories and interactions. I didn't use mercenaries despite the fairly stupid builds of the NPC companions. Then you take them away and force me to use whichever ones I randomly find or replace them with mercenaries. Mercenaries, btw, who are completely blank slates while you're approaching level 20. Some people really enjoy character creation. If you want to sit down and spec out five level 17 characters from scratch to continue the game, this is for you. If you want to be rewarded for building a coherent team over the course of the game and having that matter, you'll be disappointed. Kingdom management turned out to be pointless. Nothing mattered.

So I bought Pathfinder way back when it first came out and got the standard edition. For a while I had fun with the game, then I hit the first boss of Act 1, who proceeded to wipe out my entire party by himself. I got past it by lowering the difficulty to the easiest, but then in later Acts I hit enemies with 22 Base Attack Bonus + STR bonus + this and that which gave them such insane attack bonuses that no level 7/8 party should be facing. I actually asked someone who runs Pathfinder campaigns and told them what I hit, and his response is that is a poorly ran campaign. So yes even someone who runs Pathfinder campaigns regularly thinks this game is badly balanced. Then I decided to check more on this game on the site, and saw oh you can get the enhanced edition for $20...which has balance fixes. Sorry that should be a patch, I'm not buying the game again. So overall, if you do get this game, be sure to get at least the Enhanced Edition as it might be better, and unless you are a pathfinder expert you'll have to play it on Story or Easy mode to have a fighting chance. I'd give this a 2 - 2.5 star rating as I did have fun for a while, but I'm dropping it all the way to 1 star for charging $20 for a balance patch.