An absolutely beautiful and interesting game, hidden under inconsistent difficulty and constant loading screens.
The story would be interesting, the kingdom management is a bit stressful due to time limits, but otherwise a nice idea. The dealbreaker for me were the loading screens.
Lets say a citizen lost his dog and wants you to rescue him. No problem! First lets leave the throneroom - loading screen - cross the capital and leave for the worldmap after 20 seconds - loading screen - start moving to the location, meanwhile a kingdom notification pops up and I enter the kingdom management screen - loading screen - I click 2 things and 10 seconds later I return to the worldmap - loading screen. This continues for the rest of the game, I cant deal with this. Pity.
It is nice rpg game I like it a lot. But this game uses unity analytics which you cannot easily disable and is calling home a lot. If you value your privacy block access to unity servers on your firewall or DNS server. This should be opt in and it is totally unnecessary in single player game. Without analytics I would rate it 4 stars.
There's not one big thing wrong with this game, but rather a bunch of little things that just add up to frustration and boredom.
Pros:
+Very diverse character creation with a plethora of races, classes, and skills to choose from.
+Can play in "real time with pause" or "turn based combat" mode and switch between the two at will.
Cons:
-The writing is all over the place. It feels like 10 different people all writing different parts of the same book. Everything feels schizophrenic.
-It doesn't explain anything. It just expects you to know the Pathfinder rules and build your characters accordingly.
-It's punishingly difficult even on "Normal" difficulty. If you're not a master strategist and don't pre-buff your party before every tough fight, you're going to die.
-Even basic enemies are O.P. Don't even bother casting a status effect causing spell because there's a 99% chance that the enemies will pass their saving throws and your spell will do nothing.
-The kingdom building, while an interesting concept, is poorly executed. It takes too long to make progress, you lose progress too easily, and it's boring.
-There are still a ton of bugs in the game. Freezing during combat became routine and there was at least one side quest that I couldn't complete because an NPC refused to talk to me.
-Characters are super cliché and shallow. I found more character depth watching Saturday morning cartoons.
-Doesn't reward exploration or combat. 125 hours in and I was still collecting the same basic loot from the beginning of the game.
-It's slow. You'll play for hours without anything interesting happening.
-It loves to throw permanent stat penalties at your party that can't be removed until you sleep at your kingdom, forcing you to leave the dungeon and come back later.
-Not fun. At every step, this game seems to say, "Are you having fun? Well, stop it!", and throw something tedious or frustrating at you.
-This is the short list.
125h 49m, and I gave up. I tried.
Big fan of crpg's like Baldurs Gate and Pillars of Eternity. I was really excited to play this game, since I missed its release and only heard about it in 2020 (keep in mind that I played the mostly bug free version of this game, unlike many reviewers who struggled with it after its release, which was game breaking bug infested).
Not being familiar with the Pathfinder ruleset did not scare me away, since I was sure I'll be able to learn quickly, considering my experience with other crpg's. But boy was I wrong. The ingame Library/Bestiary/Encyclopedia is very poor and you'll be reliant on google for help.
This game has ALOT of hidden timed quests (including Main Quests). There is no timer for most of them, you'll just fail a quest/get a game over out of the blue. If you dont like to be time pressured and enjoy adventuring/exploring at your own pace then maybe reconsider getting this game.
There is also lots of save-or-die mechanics in the game, where a single buff can make the encounter completely trivial or become a nightmare, if you were unaware of the single spell/ability/curse or whatnot.
Kingdom management feels unfinished and poorly balanced and also suffers from lack of ingame information/tips. A single choice (which you'll have dozens, but only one truly matters) can make it incredibly easy to maintain stability. Poor succession of events in the kingdom management can easily and quickly lead you to a game over.
Main quest dungeons are pretty bad. Ranging from very boring (1 or 2 types of enemies in the entire dungeon) to completely unbalanced and ridiculous difficulty spike in others. Each of them requires at least 1 buff that is an absolute must, or you'll completely fail (and possibly have a game over sitution on your hands). That is just poor design. But from what I've read online, that is kind of how Pathfinder system works.
Seeing 1:30min long paralysis/stagger etc. is very common. Enjoy being stunlocked unless you have access to a specificl spell.
Pros: very faithful to d20 PF system, gives you PnP feeling.
Cons: very faithful to d20 PF system, gives you PnP feeling with a DM who hates you.
Two problems as of now: bugs and a combat. Bugs will be fixed (eventually, or you can be lucky and never see one). Combat .... is not that simple. The system itself, like any DnD variation, assumes a human DM in charge. Without a living breathing DM the rules have to be seriously altered to make the game playable. And in PF:K they were not (enough) altered. Hence - save your game often and pray to St.Random. You are expected to save often, to know the rules of PF very well and to modify the difficulty level as you play.
If you accept those facts - you will be fine and can be your own DM, changing difficulty of every encounter the way you want it to be. If you expect a traditional evenly progressing game - you might find the game unbalanced and way too difficult.
My advice - do not give up and simply learn!
