1. The story: nothing to write home about, with the exception of a few quests like "The price of curiosity" which is one of the best quests I have ever seen in a videogame, I literally could not stop laughing for 5 minutes traight. 2. Build crafting: amazing, it has enough classes and archetypes to keep you up all day long thinking about competitive/fun/whacky/broken or straight up janky party compositions. Most of those builds will never see the light of day because the game is very long and most people will not commit to a 3rd or 4th playthrough. 3. Music: cool and immersive tracks... PAPAPAN PAN PAN PAAANNN. Yup, the main menu track hits you right in the epic feels. 4. Length: the game is on the lenghty side, took me about 270 hours to complete 2 playthroughs in Hard difficulty. 5. Progression: enjoyable, if you take your time to explore and complete side quests it always feels like you are doing fine, no encounter feels out of your reach at any given moment. Lots of cool equipment to support different play styles throughout the entire game. 6. Kingdom management: somewhat interesting and fun but it becomes tedious. Takes at least one playthrough to fully grasp all the mechanics and properly manage your kingdom. 7. Quality of life: everything feels fine until you play Wrath of the Righteous and realize where Kingmaker is lacking. Most notoriously being unable to rotate the camera. 8. Performance: decent most of the time with the ocasional fps drop during turn transitions (especially latter in the game), quickly switching between turn based and real time usually fixes all problems. Conclusion: I really enjoyed it and I strongly recommend it to all rpg lovers out there, if you made it all the way down here I guarantee you will enjoy the game. The perfect cRPG would have Pathfinder's game deisgn with Pillars of Eternity's story
Here are my thoughts after 60 hours of gameplay (2 playthroughs) - Story: it does not keep you intrigued, but it is somewhat compelling nonetheless. It flows effortlessly from one mission to the next, making you travel all over the map without feeling like a chore. Story decisions only affect the tone of the conversation with the main NPC's, but dialogues options are always the same. There are plenty of side quests, but most of them lack impact. You get to enjoy 2 clearly different paths, either you save everyone or you kill everyone, anything in between is sort of lame. To conclude i would say the story is alright but nothing you will remember. - The world: you get to run around London besieged by an epidemic, so everything looks really dark, gloomy and depressing, the music does a really good job at setting the mood, 2 minutes into the game and you already feel vampiristic vibe haha. The soundtracks are very enjoyable and right on par with the overall theme of the game. The map is small and very straight forward, after a couple missions you will know the map by heart. The world does not feel immerssive at all (aside from the music which is great), conversations with the NPC are rather awkward as well as looting everybody's homes right in front of their faces. - Combat: it is terribly easy due to the fact that actions consume very little stamina and dodging overrides any other action so you do not get punished by attacking at the wrong time, making you virtually untouchable, aside from the fact that you are a magic wielding vampire fighting against humans with sticks. Regardless of how you choose to play you will always be overpowered. Even so, the combat feels smooth and it is by no means boring, you can have fun destroying people with your vampire skills. As of 01/2021 i only experienced a couple of crashes, nothing game breaking. If you can get it for under 10 eur it is definitely a good purchase as it will keep you entertained for at least 25-30 hours.
I would have never expected to have sooo much fun with this game, i got it in a giveaway but after playing i totally would have paid the full retail price. The story is very attractive and compelling, the gameplay is smooth and fun. The soundtrack is very immersive and even though there are but a few tracks, it never gets old throughout the entire playthrough. The approach on combat feels fresh and is very entertaining since positioning is a key element of the battles, as well as comboing your heroes skills, therefore every battle has a different strategy to it. Not a whole lot of build crafting since the stats are pretty straight forward and each character attunes to some of them better than other. Same goes for gear, lots of trash loot, untill you hit the spot with something rare and unique. Exploration feels rewarding and is very easy to carryout since you always have access to a map where you can check which paths are left unexplored, and if you do it well there is rarely any backtracking, so you can kind of always move forward. I enjoyed the puzzles quite a bit since they are just difficult enough to demand the use of 1 neuron, therefore they can be completed if you just stop for a second to look at it. It took me 56 hours to complete my first playthrough on epic difficulty (it didnt feel difficult at all, i would not recommend playing on any other difficulty because it will probably be a walk in the park). Every map feels completely different from the previous one, so i never felt like i was doing the same thing over and over, and as you move along the maps become more intricate and interesting. The only minor thing to point out is the ocassional crash, happened to me around 8 times during the entire playthrough. Overall a fantastic game, i strongly reccommend you give it a try!
I sincerely loved this game, I was completely baffled by how much fun had throughout my 3 playthroughs. The concept of swapping between your party members in just 1 body felt smooth and fresh in comparison to the regular 4 walking bodies. Some major thinking and quick button pressing was involved during fights to get those 4 man combos rolling out efficiently, which was pretty fun and flashy. The story is fine, with some funny dialogues here and there, plenty of side quest and it offers at 3 solid playthroughs since each of the 3 playable characters has its own story line and offers a different perspective into the core story. Thr RPG aspect is perhaps the weakest point of this game, even though there are many party members to choose from, each with its own array of skills, the game doesn't offer much in terms of customization, by this i mean that from all the stats available, only a handful of them are useful, regardless if you are gearing a mage, warrior or ranger, and the problem is that the items required for upgrading your gear are random and limited, so its only possible to fully gear 1 character, maybe 2 if you are lucky with the drops and gear doesn't really matter too much in terms of damage, therefore you can complete the game with your starter gear. Another fun aspect of the game are it's puzzles, which are just hard enough to make you think a little bit and usually provide some sort of decent gear Summary: + Great combat mechanics (positioning is quite important) + Replayable fun story (took me 90 hours to beat the game 3 times for all achievements) + Fun puzzles - Poor/frustrating gearing mechanics. Overall i'd say is a must have if you like ARPG's
It is an incredibly fun game to play, it has mechanics thatt you dont see very often like climbing big monsters in order to kill them. Building your character and companion is very fun since there are several combinations to play with. The story is pretty standard but attractive nontheless. The skills are very flashy and potent, specially if you play as a mage, massive long casting spells to wreck havoc on battles is a very gratifying experience. The game is good for around 80-100 hours of gameplay if you do every mission you encounter, and its only replayable if you like to farm for the ultimate gear since it can only be obtained by replaying the story over and over. To summarise: - Great customization options for building your character that affect how you can play the game (height, weight, etc) - Great graphics - Over the top combat system - It has a certain degree of dificulty if played on the highest difficulty available (specially on the "Dark Arisen" area)
