Pathfinder: Kingmaker has great potential, as blend of roleplaying game and building game based on a well tested concept from the original Pen and Paper Pathinder-Kingmaker adventure path. Yet, it attemps to create a verbatim copy of the adventure path as PC game, and as that fails. It suffers from several problems: - Lacklustre NPC - Poor story - Freedom deception - Hidden optimization requirements - the game feels extremely slow First and formost, the iconic NPC are flat. That makes them a great tool at the table, as they have to interpreted by the Game Master, but as characters in a computer game they convey part of the story and require more depths. Loading screens and cutscenes tell me what kind of person the NPC are, but during gameplay, it does not play any role at all. The story is your run of the mill "zero to hero" story, where a ragtag band fights a threat from beyond. Even worse, it pretends to be rather open, where in fact it is not: Most occurances are scripted, even though they are disguised as "random encounter". Pathfinder requires rules mastery for successfully playing an Adventure Path, and Kingmaker is no different. The games does not openly tell you, though, and even deceives you into believing that optimization is not necessary through the often badly built "story companions" (I greatly advise anyone to look for a character build thread in the forums). Furthermore, many events are purely based on chance. Last but not least, the game feels sluggish on my PC and reacts very slowly whenever I interact with it. That might be due to my system though. Even though I generally love this kind of game, it does not truly deliver. I cannot fully recommend it.
This game is a mess, the mechanics are clunky and it simply was no fun to play. They tried to stuff to many different games into one, and the result is not very enjoyable.
I played this game several times and got some of the endings. If you grasp the card game, it is quite tactically, but superior numbers make almost all tactics unnecessary. As you can put as many people into your band as your village can feed, things get lopsided quickly. Another problem I found was the constantly changing tone within the setting. You find deeply emotional moments next to whimsical slapstick, as if several people put storylines into the game without consulting each other. Still, in several parts, the game's own charm shines through. It has its own take on several clichés, and leaves you choices.
Now, that I have played the game through, there is quite a lot I liked about it: The humour, the lovingly animated and drawn enemies, and just as much the details that were put into the background. The story, while not great, suffices for a computer game, and the ending was rewarding. It was well integrated and fit the universe. On the other hand, the game was tedious. Grinding is the core mechanic, without it, the party won't be strong enough to kill some of the late game bosses. You will only find the best equipment on crawls, too. And here comes the primal weakness: There simply was insufficient variance to keep the grinding interesting. There were only few different areas to crawl through, and within those few different monsters. Sure, procedurally generated dungeons will be always different, but that alone does not guarantee replayability: You'd also need either different tactical approaches to try, different stories to follow, or some other kind of different influence. Now, this is in no way a bad or unplayable game. It is an acceptable little game, but it lacks the little something that would turn it into a good game.
