Let me get this out of the way straight up, the game has some bugs and some parts of it are subpar *ahem kingdom management. But the meat of the game - the roleplaying and adventuring, is superb. The char creation is fantastic, your companions are interesting and they all have unique personalities and the story is written quite well - far better than any other modern RPG I've played.
Most of these types of games have me just auto clicking the good choices everytime they appear but in this game, I actually picked evil choices every now and then because the game actually got me emotionally invested and dammit I need revenge. So 5 stars for a game thats broken me out of my comfort zone and actually made me think and feel something
This game uses the ruleset of Paizos Pathfinder RPG and gives you many different choices during the dialogues.
The pacing during the chapters is at the right speed and you get always something to do.
There are different modes the game switches through, while you play.
When you travel through your land, you get to see the big Map, where you select the direction or the waypoint you want to travel to.
When you reach a certain waypoint or get ambushed during your travels you enter the exploring screen.
If you got to fight during exploration the fight initiates instantly and your movement gets turnbased if the option is activated.
The turnbased movement has to be used if you play at normal or higher difficulty.
In several situation you get dialogues at which you get certain options to select, which affect your alignment and can change it if you often select decisions of this type of alignment.
Some dialogue options are choosable if you have certain alignments or if you pass certain skill checks.
The kingdom management screen enables you to build buildings in your villages, react on events and to skip days, so that events complete.
It is important to know for new players, that there is a button "Y" (eye) with which you get certain information about your opponents.
These informations are absolutely important, because you get to know the immunities and damage reductions of an enemy.
It is also important to save every now and then, because the game is sometimes crashes, espacially if you use mods.
One thing that would be great for a second replay would be the possibility to skip days until the next event would happen, or to autoassign advisors for events.
With this options the kingdom management would be more fluid.
I would also like the option to just find money instead of simple weapons, which I would just sell for money.
Thank you for this great game and more than 500 hours of gameplay.
Please make more games like this.
Being an advent D&D and Pathfinder player for many years, I knew I absolutely had to have this game. From the description of the game, it seemed like it was going to offer an immense amount of options to gameplay and character creation; In the end, Owlcat Games delivered exactly that! I know a lot of these reviews (some have age on them now are negative because of bugs. True, the game had/has bugs, but I will challenge you with this question: How many games of this magnitude are bug free? What a lot of these negative reviewers don't bother telling you is that Owlcat, almost bi-weekly, releases some sort of update, bug fixing patch to the game. I just finished the game after an astounding 300+ hours on the main story! How many solo games do you know that can offer that immense amount of content? Very few.
Below is my list of pros and cons, take from it what you will:
Pros +
*Nice graphics
*Nice fitting music
*Highly customizable characters true to the Pathfinder ruleset
*Enormous game, hundreds of hours of gameplay if you search for every nook and cranny like I do
*Good play style, live turn based action with pause (perfect for this genre)
*Many updates, including a couple of FREE DLCs!
*Good balance on encounters. Some were obviously tougher, but I never felt I had no chance
*For price, this game is a HUGE bargain!
Cons -
*In game hints/directions can be vague/incomplete. Nothing a quick google can't fix. I would compare it to an original Everquest questing system AT TIMES. Sometimes it leads you to the target.
*May still be some bugs and gliches. But, its a BIG game and the devs are constantly updating this game.
*So far, the DLCs, even the pay to gain DLCs are fairly small.
I give this game 8.5/10 and it is easily 5 stars for the price vs content (and thats at full price! With a sale it would be higher!) If you are an avid fan of Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, or any other classic in this genre, then this game is most certainly for you!
I've spent over 120h on this game and beat it, but I still didn't see everything there's to see.
If someone asked me to put a top 3 isometric(ish) cRPG games of recent years I'd definitely put Pathfinder: Kingmaker on the list (next to the Divinity Original Sin II and Pillars of Eternity II).
For some reason I haven't heard of this game before premiere, so I wasn't hyped, only found it out recently and gave it a go. Seems like that was lucky as this game had a lot of issues in its early life. Now in 1.3.x patches the game had almost no technical issues. (few times it froze completely when I was alt-tabbing, but that's it).
What makes this game really unique is it's strategy layer. This is really well done and a big and important part of the game, and not just some optional mechanism. It also blends really well with the story and gameplay.
Another very good thing was the story itself, it's really nice, full, interesting and deep. To be honest I was expecting something completely different, but I don't want to spoil anything.
I liked the Pathfinder character creation system, which is almost like well known Dungeons & Dragons but with much easier multiclassing and many interesting classes I could try. It allowed me to create a very interesting and powerful character, so I'm very happy about it.
For me all these things alone are enough to call it a very good game, but there's more smaller good things, like nice music, graphics, characters, lore etc. Also the ability to control the difficulty levels on the fly!
I think that besides some minor technical issues I mentioned before the only big flaw that comes to my mind is that there are quite a few repetitive elements in the game (eg. similar/same maps being reused). But that's not too bad.
If I could give a score with a fraction I would give something like 4.8/5
This is the one and only true successor of BG1/2. I become pretty old while waiting for a game that provides the same feeling I had playing BG1/2 when it was released in 1998. Owlcat did a really nice job and they are still doing with steadily improvements. They created a very big game with hundreds of hours of gameplay. Interesting I just compared the pure HDD space of several games.
BG1=0,6GB
BG1 enhanced=3,04GB
POE=15,2GB
POE2=41,4GB
Kingmaker enhanced=43,6GB
