After some reviews, I was really looking forward to this game. Seemed like my cup of tea! Well, it's a mess. Between all the zooming and panning and UI elements appearing and disappearing, I was fighting more with the game than with the enemies. The game's systems are very opaque, too. For example you are making superficial story-choices all along which give you special abilities. Only you don't know which abilities you'll get and the new one replaces the old one. Right, only one ability, which usually is necessary to win battles and might be dependent on special terrain that isn't there. Oh, and you also got only one save game, so the whole thing is Iron Man. So all in all, this felt like having little agency neither concerning the UI nor the character build nor the story. I've heard the game is also very short. But to be honest, I couldn't bring myself to finish even one run.
Kingmaker has been getting mixed reviews for a reason: It certainly is no game for the masses. It is near perfect, however, for pen-and-paper role players who also love grand computer RPGs like Baldur's Gate 2. In fact, no game has ever come so close to giving me the feeling of an actual tabletop session. You can tell at every corner they took a popular official Pathfinder campaign and made an effort of love to turn it into a single player computer game. It's not just the great storytelling, the meaningful choices, the atmospheric presentation - you will also find a lot of situations that are pretty common in pnp: A campsite with corpses and untouched provisions right in the middle of a battleground? Maybe hestitate to rest there. Also, a successful perception check might further support your suspicion. But let's adress the most common complaints: .:. Difficulty & Balancing .:. Kingmaker is not a difficult game per se. It offers, however, a huge world with tons of stuff to do and areas to explore, most of which your party will be too weak for at the beginning. Yes, there is no level-scaling of enemies, which I'm very thankful for because you actually experience progress. If you stumble upon an overwhelming foe, you flee and come back later to triumph. Also, the game offers many difficulty settings that you can always adjust on the fly. Hate kingdom management? Set it on auto. Don't want to fiddle with character builds? Set levelling to auto and stick to normal difficulty for encounters. .:. Gimmicky Builds .:. The Pathfinder system is notorious in that you should plan your classes somewhat in advance. For me and many others, this adds another fun element. If you don't like it, there are many good builds online and the preset builds work well enough, too. .:. Choices and Hidden Consequences .:. Almost everything you do will open up or close parts of the story. Roll with it or use a guide. Just like in Fallout New Vegas which is commonly praised for exactly this.
I should! And I want to. Everything I learned in 30 years of gaming tells me: This is the good stuff! The game has everything: Interesting characters, a vibrant world full of secrets and endearing side quests, mystery, great voice acting, a solid battle mechanic, meaningful skills, legendary items, choices with consequences, multiple approaches for almost every problem... Every nook and cranny of this thing tells of the love and experience the developers put into it. But I just can't seem to enjoy it. It is just too much of everything. Too many encounters, too many stories, too many items and mechanics and areas. Every barrel contains random loot, every NPC has a backstory and a quest, every level-up needs time spent on the wiki. I start the game, play for 5 hours and still am more or less where I was before. I really loved the more focussed predecessor. But part 2 isn't for me, and I have a bad feeling about Baldur's Gate 3, too.
...only it's not. This game might have had its time 20 years ago, but for a 2014 release it is appaling. The graphics honestly look like straight from "The Sims 2". The sound design is borderline inexcusable - playing the same gargling zombie sounds over and over. Combat is a slog... especially when there are more than two enemies somehow the game manages to take forever calculating them doing a single attack or passing their turn. There's also no tactical desicion making to speak of. You are standing around clobbering at each other. In slow turn-based style. Also, there are zero quality of life tweaks. For example to exchange an item between party members, one of them has to walk to the other and go right-click-backpack. Your stash at the base is an actual shelf in one of the rooms you have to walk to in order to equip anything. It's really a shame because you can tell there is a great game somewhere beneath the all this. I just can't get myself two spend the time needed to get there. Still, one star for what might have been.
This would be a fun mobile game to play on the train or in bed 20 mins before sleeping. But for a gaming night on your PC it's just too shallow and repetitive.
I don't always finish my games. Even more so when the gameplay doesn't catch me. But this jewel just has one of the best settings and story of everything I played in recent years. Combined with a fantastic soundtrack, I just couldn't stop returning every night. Somehow it felt like a novel of Neil Gaiman. And after finishing it, I feel the same nostalgic satisfaction a good book leaves me with. If you like the action matches, this could easily be "six stars" for you. If not so much, just tune down the difficulty and enjoy the world.
