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.
