Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition

Lot's of content and good story but suffers from really bad design. The AI is bare bones for your NPC companions so they require excessive individual micromanagement. The horribly slow overworld travel time combined with equally horrible rest time as in actual IRL time spent just watching slow animations while you are just trying to get from point A to B and back again. You do this hundreds of times traveling the map back and forth and gods help you if you travel in the mountains where it grinds to a crawl and forces you to rest even more often. Also selling items has a delay between each item for some dumb reson so that takes forever to do. Over all a good game but the tedium of meningless downtime gets maddening after a while.

For many years the "Baldur's Gate" was THE gold standard for CRPGs. I spent countless hours playing it and its expansion packs and sequels. There has been a mini-renaissance of CRPG's with Kickstarter games. "Pillars of Eternity" was ok but hobbled by a depressing story, and irritating dialogue that made it seem like learning a new language (fampyrs? really?), and just overall missing some spark of magic. "Divinity Original Sin" - and especially its sequel - came along to satisfy the exciting part combat of the BG series. But nothing matched that BG magic... until now! Look past early reviews of bugs for this game - they've long been patched! Read deeper into the comments of those who complain about the game. Many of the things they complain about are the things that made BG great!!! Go back and play BG - guess what... it is hard! Your newb characters die when something sneezes at them! And if you don't take time to study certain monsters strengths & weaknesses, you're gonna be in trouble. The same is true here, but that is part of what makes the game fun! It is not a game that can be played on autopilot - it is deep and rich and well worth the effort to invest in it! The companions / NPCs are well written and fun. The depth of character creation is incredible - races, classes, feats, spells, ability modifiers, etc. - it is all here! The story and the dialogue is well written. And the kingdom building is intense - a fun twist that adds to the game. It is exciting to actually watch your decisions and the very real results it has on the people of your kingdom. The combat is exceptional and brings the best of what BG had to offer into the modern age. You can't just turn a blind eye and expect your party to annihilate everything they encounter. This makes combat exciting and fun. If you loved the Baldur's Gate, you owe it to yourself to try this game. Over 350 hours in & I'm still enjoying it. 3rd play through now and expect I won't stop until the sequel comes out.

I'm 120 hours in and don't seem close to finished, so you get a lot of game for your money. I'm also a pathfinder tabletop veteran, which helps. This game is designed around a specific Pathfinder Adventure Path about establishing a barony/kingdom, and to replicate that it consists of two things: 1) wandering around fighting monsters and looting stuff, like Baldurs Gate or many other RPGS, and 2) managing your barony. Both parts seem pretty important to the overall experience. The wandering around and fighting parts are competently executed using a slightly simplified subset of the Pathfinder (first edition) tabletop rules. These rules are not very intuitive and not very well explained (not that there's a lot that could be explained, given how complicated the tabletop is), so if you aren't familiar with Pathfinder as a tabletop game this could be a serious problem. However, if you are familiar with them, they basically work as you'd expect them to and the game seems to be a solid implementation, with real-time-but-pause-when-you-like gameplay. The barony-management part is functional, but again it is bad at explaining itself, and some things are remarkably irritating. For example, you set your advisors tasks to do, and the process of setting tasks takes no time, while the tasks themselves do take time and are time critical. But some of the barony activity keeps our main character busy for a fortnight and fast-forwards time for this period, meaning you can't even issue orders while you're doing it. This side of the game seems significantly weaker to me - there ARE tactics to it, but between hidden deadlines and poor explanations it's not really been fun for me and I would rather play a game without it. Overall then it's a narrow niche. You have to like the Baldurs Gate style of RPG, you have to like or at least get on with the Pathfinder ruleset, and you have to like or at least not mind the barony stuff. Within that... yeah, it's solid.

I've been playing D&D since I was a teenager (pen and paper!), and loved CRPGs like Baldur's Gate and Pillars of Eternity. Both games had something epic happening, whether you're the child of a dead god or unearthing other-worldly secrets, and there was always a sense of accomplishment when you completed a quest. Pathfinder: Kingmaker manages to leave that out of the the experience. Version 2.08 Enhanced Edition fixed a lot of things, but balance is not one of them. Prepare to die. A lot. For no good reason. Pros: 1. Plenty of options for builds, both for the player character and mercenaries 2. The graphics are very good 3. There are plenty of mods that make the game more manageable/fun Cons: 1. Enemies continuously roll incredible "to hit" dice while the player misses way too often 2. Random encounters that can wipe out your party in 3-4 hits 3. Area travel is tedious and slow 4. Feminist slant in both NPCs and game descriptions (always her, she, etc. - no masculine pronouns) 5. Combat is very sluggish 6. NPCs are boring, possibly Linzi being the exception because her voice acting is wonderful 7. Conversation actions that will change your alignment with no other choices to prevent it If you enjoyed building relationships with your NPCs in other games, you likely will be disappointed here. Remember how funny Minsc was in Baldur's Gate? Imoen was cute, Xzar was maniacal, and they all had important roles and backstories related to the plot. I wish I didn't need to say this, but the relationships here are just boring. As the player character, I don't feel important or central to the story, and the result is that there is no epic feel to the story to immerse you into the game. I played for over 60 hours before the game became so frustrating and boring (at the same time) that I stopped playing. The word "game" inherently implies that something is going to be fun, and Pathfinder: Kingmaker is not.

The story captivated from the very start and even without prior Pathfinder setting knowledge I was able to get my bearings. Still, the game is very unforgiving with it's timer design and enemies which use spells or abilities that drain your companions attributes forcing you to either rest or painfully try to survive with a companion that is one attribute damage away from death. The good thing is that eventually you too get those spells, however in my case I had already cleared most of the map at that point and weren't able to much use those. Characters and their personal stories were interesting on top of that with enhanced edition the reported bugs seem to be gone. However, there are some problems with it too: Some quest tips are very vague, and certain quests are also heavily railroaded. Kingdom management seems half-baked and the construction of buildings, etc. (in kingdom management) does not affect the 3D environments of your villages which you will be seeing. On top of that you don’t actually see your kingdom. Technical problems with the mouse getting blocked by 3D assets (environment or even certain dead mobs) when trying to order a companion to use throwable flasks or spells in caves or similar tight corridors. This I was able to circumvent with a camera rotation mod. Very little voice acting after the third chapter or so, however it picks up near the endgame. AI for warrior characters doesn’t seem to use unlocked abilities. During the playthrough the game crashed 6 times with 5 of those in a certain part of the endgame, but luckily, I was able to fix the constant crashes in the endgame by switching to windowed mode. In summary, flawed game with interesting premise and good story, however I wouldn’t recommend this to people new to cRPG or without patience. To those I’d recommend the Pillars of Eternity.