This game is, for good or for bad, exactly what it looks like - an entire video game based on Resident Evil 4's inventory management. If the idea doesn't sound appealing, the game is probably not for you. If, however, you finished RE4 and still have an urge for some inventory management, the game should be perfect. This is also one of those rare games where some of the puzzles require that you hurt yourself on purpose. Really didn't expect it when I encountered such a solution for the first time.
A pretty nice retro-ish FPS that made me wish there were more games that had this kind of alien, really fantastical level design. My only real complaint is that the game turns into sort-of OSHA Violation Simulator in later episodes when it starts throwing at the player a lot of locations where it's easy to slip off and fall into nothingness.
A nice retro shooter that looks like Quake, but secretly actually uses a Doom-like engine with polygonal graphics shoved in. The final episode (levels 13 to 16) looks like some kind of an HD version of Doom's episode 1, with the boss fight reminding me of Quake's final boss. My only real complaint would be that you sometimes get some weird collision with level geometry because of how the game engine actually works, and that there's a danger of accidentally softlocking the final bonus level unless you know in advance what you're supposed to do. You see, in this game, you don't just mindlessly shoot at the bosses until they die. Instead, every boss has a special gimmick that acts as the only way to kill it. The problem with Bonifaciy is that not only could you find his gimmick to not be obvious, but it's also time-limited, meaning that by the time you figure it out, it's already too late and you need to restart the whole level. I wish they'd make the game open source just so we could see what kind of black magic sorcery they did with the engine, but alas.
I've been playing video games for 20 years. As far as I can remember at the moment of writing this review, Pathfinder: Kingmaker is the only game that actually disappointed me. All other games for which I wrote negative reviews had objective faults that ruined those games. This is the only one for which I leave a negative review because it's not what it should have been, or at the very least what I expected it to be. I expected Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance. What I got instead is Baldur's Gate. I'm a fan of grand strategy games. As such, when I first heard about Kingmaker, I was very interested. A fantasy RPG in which you also have to take care of your own kingdom? I knew I had to take a look. What I expected was an RPG that requires that you spend a lot of time managing your kingdom. Economy, diplomacy, building infrastructure, passing laws, stuff like that. What I got instead is a generic CRPG in which you also make a handful of decisions about your kingdom. For just five minutes. Every two or so hours. 95% of time you're out in the field adventuring, as if you were playing Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights. I'm sorry, but if I wanted to play those games, I'd actually play those games instead, not a game that claims to be all about building your own kingdom. And then the devs have the audacity to give you an option to turn even that off by making it automatic. This is the only game I know of, besides patched Daikatana, that allows you to turn its most important gameplay feature off. That's never a good sign. And this is not even touching upon some of the questionable design choices. This may be the first time I label a video game as a waste of potential. It could have been a fantasy kingdom sim (reference intended), with equal emphasis on adventuring and kingdom management, but ended up being the same as any other CRPG that's been released in the last 7 years. 95% adventuring, 5% kingdom management, the entire point of the game completely wasted.
The fact that I can seriously use the sentence from this review's title for Soldier of Fortune 2 after having lots of fun with Soldier of Fortune 1 tells me something with this game has went horribly wrong. It's suffering with just too many highly questionable design choices to be fun. 1. Colombia levels have too much thick foliage, making it difficult to spot enemies. They, however, do not suffer with this problem and will gladly mow you down while you can't even see them. 2. Too many grenade-throwing enemies, with explosive grenades giving very little time to react if they land near you. 3. Enemies find it far too easy to quickly mow you down, even on lower difficulty levels. 4. Limited amount of saves per level, making the previous three complaints even worse. And for some reason, they decided to sacrifice the cheesier atmosphere from the first game and make this one more "realistic". Not only do I not understand why they did this, me preferring the first one's B movie atmosphere, but even this is inconsistent. It's serious most of the times, but then you get the helicopter level where one of the NPCs starts playing Ride of the Valkyrie, something I'd not expect in a "serious" story at all. I have a feeling this was basically a foreshadowing of how bad SoF 3 turned out to be.
In gameplay terms, this game is what Planescape: Torment should have been: it completely ditches all combat, which was present in P:T but felt forced, and focuses entirely on characters. Without combat, all challenge comes from skill checks, and yes, you can still die (if you fail certain checks or pick a wrong dialog option in some conversations).
A solid 10/10 boomer shooter. If other boomer shooters are as fun as this one, I'd definitely buy them as well.
