The main campaign quickly turns into a mess of visual effects, bloated numbers and pointless after pointless fight. After the soul crushing experience of the last two acts (at least) of the main campaign this is a welcome change of pace: low level, focussed on character builds and not overpowered items, to the point narrative with low stakes. I specially liked how they work around the limitations of the engine to implement scenarios where you might be outmatched but you can still use the environment in your favour, the problem is of course that the limitations still play a role, because all of these clever solutions can be easily found by pressing tab. In anycase, this is the right way to push the series forward, I'd only add more open world into the experience, being able to return to areas and find new challenges will add a lot, the experience in Through the Ashes is just linear. As for number bloating and constant power creep, it might be ingrained into the base rule set, but regardless of where it comes from, it really helps to keep the max level bounded and the experience challenging without the need of constant more and more powerful enemies thrown at you. By the end of the main campaign I have so many tools at my disposal that just pre buffing (which I hate) could become a chore of minutes and then still miss some of the buffs that the game made necessary by amping up enemies with all kinds of ridiculous buffs, and even then I would not use 80% of my arsenal because it wasn't necessary, that's just a sign of lack of focus and more breadth than depth design. So if you like a more focused experience that engages your brain, gives you the bare minimum and forces you to use all of it, this is a campaign for you.
I mean from Pathfinder Kingmaker. I own this game in GOG but the previous one in Steam, and when I left the review for its predecessor I was pretty impressed with what the studio achieved, to be fair I played it years after the full set of DLCs and patches was out, so I avoided the crashes and bugs, but still in terms of narrative, choices and characters I just ended up wanting more. But, the final acts, specially the last one felt uninspired and rushed, it was just basically a long set of tough fights, most of them against the same mobs of enemies, I just turned the difficulty to the minimum and breezed all the way to the end credits, I just couldn't stand the soul draining repetition. Not sure who found that fun, but it isn't for me. Gone were the charming character moments and interesting combat set pieces, there were no more interesting character decisions to make either and of course no kingdom management, which wasn't great but it was a change of pace. So what happened with this new game: they thought that adding even more classes and archetypes, increasing the power level to the max and adding even more fights was the answer. So if you didn't like the constant fight into fight dynamic expect even worse here, fights take longer, enemies are more bloated (on all difficulty levels) to the point that stats don't even make sense anymore, like some mobs having the same stats as demon lords. What a game like this needs is more focus into what makes it great: character building in stat sense and in a narravite sense, not more "though" enemies and mob fights, the fights were so long that I became disgusted with the fighting team to the point that when it glitched out I felt relief. So in short: the game still has a lot that is recommendable in act 1 to 3 (refer to the second paragraph), the mythic levels do add an instersting character building layer. After that it breaks pretty fast, the performance is atrocious and the characters and quests become annoying.
