The lack of cover mechanics and the like makes this rather bare-bones, and the cognition point system is just kind of silly. The idea that a mechanicus warrior can't use their weapons without arbitrary points gained from scanning is absurd, and also creates situations where your units are just standing around doing nothing. Also, the difficulty of missions seems to be broken. I've run into "easy" missions where I am outnumbered and out-geared, whereas other "easy" missions pit me against very winnable odds. There should not be this much variance within a single difficulty rating.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker is in many ways an admirable attempt at a Baldur's Gate-style game for the Pathfinder RPG system, and at first glance it appears to be competently put together. The reason I give this such a bad score is varied, but it's mainly a case of horrible balance. At "normal" difficulty the game is so hard you might as well be playing with a Game Master who uses loaded dice. One of the earliest quests, for example, has swarms. Swarms are immune to normal weapon damage and automatically hit, and are also typically poisonous. The game does provide you with anti-swarm weapons, but these deal area damage and are likely to hit your own party. With how deadly and numerous enemies are, it's like the game expects you to rest after every encounter. The issues only become more apparent towards the late game, where enemies have insanely high saving throws and spell resistance, to the point that some fights are simply a matter of chance. For example, an enemy might have an aura that paralyzes your entire party unless they make a very difficult saving throw, but not just once, oh no, it happens *every round.* The final dungeon is the epitome of this, and also kills some of your party members if you haven't completed their side-quests. It doesn't warn you that this will happen. The game also loves to waste your time. Several quests require you to wait a set amount of time, but in some cases they are lying to you and actually require you to do certain things to progress. Oh, and they're main quests that you must do within a time limit or lose the game. The kingdom management is also terrible. You assign advisors to tasks and hope they roll high. Advisors can only work on one task at a time, most of which take two or more weeks, and you don't have access to all your advisors off the bat either. You can rank them up to make them better, but this not only takes their time, but *yours* too. My advice: mod the game *heavily* and don't bother with the final dungeon.
