Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition Reviews

Initial playthrough: Failed 2 checks during the conversation after killing the assassins and now the swordmasters think I'm a spy. Went to an inn and fought some bandits. Guy gave me a quest to get fangberries or something. Fought some spiders in the cave and now all my party members have -6 permanent strength damage. One of my party members died attempting to pick the berries after five attempts so I gave up. Went exploring and found a swamp that had some a story event and now all my party members have Curse of Feeble Body and a -6 constitution penalty that can't be removed. Fuck this game.

It's a long game. You need to know a ton or have the wiki open to act correctly to even progress past the timed events, even near the endgame. The story has awesome parts and the overarching theme is great but there's so much slog and unnecessary interactions, like finding a piece of smoked sausage in your bowl of gruel from time to time. If you are willing to minmax, keep the wiki open and possibly bust out a spreadsheet of events and items, this is the CRPG for you.

Not much fun. I might try it again but just too frustrating to be enjoyable.

I've hesitated posting a review for over 250 hrs of play, and my verdict is No. I do like the mechanics of the game play sticking to the Pathfinder rule set, but the story mechanics is broken. Way too many required things to do in an exacting time frame. Miss the exact time to be in the right location, you miss out. Finish a mission to prevent the (always) impending doom of your rule. you STILL have to send off advisors with a 0% chance to complete the mission???. Could not figure out why it kept failing until i read through a "wiki" Many other annoying bugs and just and just slammed with events that are not achievable without reading a walkthrough.

Whoever had the horrible idea to ruin this game with quest timers deserves a place at the bottom of hell. If you like bugs, you'll love this game. Play Pillars of Eternity instead.

Was initially a bit wary of the reputation this game has but I'm actually liking it a little better than Wrath of the Righteous so far tbh and I adore that game flaws and all so please give this a try and ignore the reviews. In Wrath the crusade mechanics felt like trivial fluff once you got your head around it largely because of Setsuna Shy but also because they clearly dumbed it down in response to the kingdom mechanics of this game which are actually really dynamic, compelling, and involved rather than just being flavor and illusion of mechanical depth like in Wrath. Out of fear I set the kingdom management to Easy and turned on invincible kingdom just in case for my first run but after engaging with the system I kinda wish I had gone with Normal to see how I'd have done. Just save often and dont be obviously stupid with your time and you'll be ok and if you still dont like it you can just turn it down to Trivial or turn it off entirely, its optional and also pretty telling that it will not put you to custom diff setting for doing this. I'm playing on Challenging (would be Core in Wrath) just to be safe as the highest setting I beat Wrath in was Hard (one setting up). Also kinda dig encounters and combat. Enemies arent absolutely stacked with a f you amount of permanent prebuffs and inflated stats like in Wrath so despite not having nearly as many op player abilities its actually a lot more flexible and welcoming, or maybe I just know the pathfinder system too well now but I swear even on Daring (one setting down from the equivalent setting in this game I'm playing on) Wrath enemies are way more brutal, probably also owing to being mostly demons and having innate immunities to a ton of shit wholesale and all having some spell resistance. Dont gotta worry about that here I've fought maybe five demons in the whole game (so far). In exchange though hope you like fighting wolves and owlbears. Only real critiques are UI being kinda fugly and some qol downgrades compared to its successor like not being able to dispel your own spells at will (gotta watch where you grease lol) and inventory management, that and its a bit scuffed technically still in terms of bugs,oversights and crashes, etc and apparently owlcat couldnt go back to fix any further due to losing the rights to the game. Sad. Still real good.

Throughout my playtime in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, one phrase kept repeating in my mind: "This is the best bad game I've ever played." I started and dropped the game multiple times since its launch and only now sat through and actually got through the game. If you're looking for a traditional CRPG in the veins of Baldur's Gate or the like, Pathfinder: Kingmaker has you covered there. Unfortunately, along with that comes the pain of being a company's first release, not to mention the length of the game being gargantuan as well. For every one thing the game gets right, there's two more it gets wrong holding it back. You get the immersive feeling of a world to explore and characters to interact and change their lives but in return, you deal with time limits that gate how much exploring you can actually do and characters whose lives seem to stop after you finish their questline. The game recreates the tabletop experience with its breadth of spells, classes, and weapons to choose from however you then have to deal with incessant fights with monsters who are designed to annoy the player and at the end game, infuriate. The end game is really what sealed my point of view on the game. The last dungeon is filled with monsters, that if you did not build around them, could force your game to stretch on for hours due to them inflicting debilitating debuffs forcing you to rest often. In this same dungeon, there are annoying puzzles forcing you to google maps to figure out where you are, just to drag out your 100+ hour gameplay experience out even further. The final nail in the coffin was at the final boss, I realized I missed a single speech check 50 hours ago forcing me to be unable to achieve the ending I was going for, despite me 100%ing the game otherwise. Ultimately, the game is a good first try for Owlcat and at the time was a welcome reception to expanding the CRPG userbase. Where we are currently however, there is no need to play this game unless you are starved for high fantasy CRPGs. Owlcat's next game, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is so far ahead of this game you would have more fun playing and beating that game, and then just restarting as opposed to picking Kingmaker up afterwards.

I wanted to like this game, the devs took a chance on a huge gameplay mechanic and it is sadly horrible. I can't recomend this game but I've heard that the devs learned thier lesson and made thier later games better. Basicaly the problem is: - gameplay breaking bugs. - Way too much meta game knowledge needed to even complete the main story without a online guide. - A mechanic that ends your run on 200 hours for a badly telegraphed timed event 150 hours in, cool :)

So I don't often write reviews but just wanted to address what appear to be the two main gripes in the negative reviews here, namely the kingdom management and linked to that a game over you can get if you're not paying attention. So, first of all, the kingdom management I don't think is a problem at all and just adds a little level of management sim to the game. Of course not everyone is into that and may just want to play the actual RPG. You can quite literally set the kingdom management to be done on auto, so you never have to bother with it, so not enjoying it is not even a valid complaint as you simply don't have to do it. Second, the possible game over that some are alleging comes out of nowhere. Your kingdom advisors and the in game text in your quest log make it very clear there is going to be severe consequences if you do not complete the required piece of research in time. It may not outright state it will be game over but it is enough that it's very obvious you should be doing it as a priority. You have 200 in game days to do it and the research takes 60 days. You have plenty of time, it's not like you just have to drop everything and do it instantly. This to me is another complaint that is completely not valid. Now, if you like Baldurs Gate style games, you will like this game. It's that simple.

I've tried and tried and tried to just push through this game and ignore my issues with it, but after a while, I just couldn't take it anymore. The 90% of the main characters are insufferable, the morality of the devs is shown to be completely screwed up through what they think is acceptable moral behavior (their concepts of good and evil are wildly messed up. Seriously, it's not "good" to invite legions of evil creatures to live in a city of innocent and defenseless people), their ambition was greater than their ability, and I run into a lot of broken content when it comes to how the game is supposed to work verse how it does. I guess some of the music is fine. I'll probably come back to this and create a more thorough review, but I'm just too grouchy to do it now and I want a more clearheaded take.