3.5/5 ★ – TheBenitoPizza's review of Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker – It's Good to be the King (or is it?) Pathfinder: Kingmaker is an isometric cRPG set in the Pathfinder fantasy universe. The player takes control of an adventurer and their group of companions, trying to establish a kingdom in the Stolen Lands. Let's start with the most important – Pathfinder: Kingmaker uses the Pathfinder ruleset, which is a modification of 3.5 D&D. On one hand, the rules are well implemented and in many regards the game emulates the tabletop experience very nicely. On the other hand though, if you're not familiar with the rules, you're going to have a hard time. Before starting the game, I'd had to do a lot of research just to understand the character creation. What doesn't help is that the game isn't exactly easy, even on the Normal difficulty, so optimising your characters is more important than in other cRPGs. Same goes for combat – while there are a lot of encounters which you can just rush through, many of them, especially early on and then in the late game, require you to understand the mechanics, otherwise you'll be having a bad time. Although the game provides some explanations, many of them are incomplete, misleading, or outright missing. The majority of the game is standard (c)RPG – you and your party go around the map, solve quests, explore various locations and fight enemies (or persuade them not to fight you). The combat unsurprisingly uses Pathfinder rules and can be either in Real Time with Pause or Turn-Based, but unlike for example Pillars of Eternity 2, you can switch between these two modes at will, which is a thing I just can't appreciate enough. Regarding the location and encounter design, I sadly feel that the devs have chosen quantity over quality. The number of locations is really high, but a lot of them are just copypasted versions of the other ones and in result don't feel as unique (also, the maps of the individual locations are rather small). Same goes for the combat encounters – while there are some really nice and clever ones, most of them (especially towards the end of the game) consist of waves upon waves of same-ish enemies. That unfortunately kinda sucked the fun out of the gameplay for me. I really would have enjoyed it more if the game had less encounters and locations in total, with more unique ones among them. As for the other gameplay aspects, a lot of the game consists of dice roll checks. That wouldn't be necessarily bad, as it is a crucial part of any D&D campaign, but Kingmaker sadly acts like an unfriendly dungeon master. Failing a check in this game really isn't as fun as passing it, because often you hit a wall just because of a failed roll. Sometimes those walls are just chests you can't unlock (you can actually try after you level up, but who has the time for that), other times you can't continue through a conversation, or miss a hidden area with important items. Also, a lot of the checks are hidden, meaning if you fail them you won't know that you had the chance to make some things differently (and again, some of these are quite important). Talking about this, there is also a lot of permanently missable stuff, including 3 missable companions. Apart from the regular cRPG gameplay, Pathfinder: Kingmaker also includes kingdom management, meaning once you found your country, you have to take care of it. Although this may sound good, in reality it was just bothersome. The management aspect isn't complex or deep enough to be fun, but if you ignore it it can actually cause a game over. It consists of two types of activities – buildin villages and towns (which is almost completely pointless except for a few good buildings) and solving events. These come in form of a short description, telling you what is happening and what needs to be done; you deal with them via a d20 check. The majority of events aren't tied to the story in any way and are actually randomized. There's also a limited number of them, meaning about halfway through the game you begin to encounter ones you've already seen. Count in the fact that failing enough 'problem' events will destroy your kingdom so a series of unlucky dice rolls can lead to a game over, especially in the early game. Fortunately you have the ability to tone down the kingdom management difficulty regardless of the difficulty of the rest of the game. Nevertheless, there wasn't anything I particularly enjoyed about this part of Kingmaker. The story is good, just that. Nothing extraordinary, but enough to keep you entertained and wondering what comes next. It consists of several chapters and, what's neat, it really nicely escalates, so you really want to see more and eagerly await the finale. There are some twists, many of them quite obvious, but also surprising ones. As for the writing itself, that's kind of a mixed bag for me. Some of the characters, be it companions, villains or regular NPCs, are really well written and interesting, others are rather dull and rely on clichés. I actually feel the same about the voice acting. On some occasions it just clicks and really enhances the character, while sometimes it isn't that good up to the point I would consider it a bit cringe. Speaking of voice acting, I can't leave out the fact that not all lines are voice acted (I actually think that the ones that are form a minority), but that wasn't really a problem, at least for me. The soundtrack is also quite nice, featuring tracks composed by Inon Zur himself. With that being said, they start to feel repetitive after a while, mainly because the game is so long (more on that later) that you get to hear each of them at least a hundred times (I'm not exaggerating), which leads to them going from nice to annoying. Now to the technical details – the graphics are good, having a bit different style than for example Pillars of Eternity or Baldur's gate, and not demanding (it's an isometric RPG after all), although I experienced some FPS drops without any obvious reason. What bothered me more is that I encountered quite a lot of bugs, especially with the Turn-Based mode and music. None of them were exactly gamebreaking, but all of them were very annoying, simply because how often they happened. I know that Kingmaker is a Kickstarted game and that the state was much worse when the game released, but still, I feel like a version that calls itself the 'Enhanced Plus Edition' shouldn't have that many glitches. The final thing I'd like to write about is the length of the game. Seriously, Kingmaker is one of the longest games I've ever played (probably the longest now that I think of it), taking circa 180 hours. The upside to this is that it really does justice to the scale of the story (which spans several years) and the size of the world (for illustration – I played the game from March to July, so at the end it felt like the story truly began a long time ago). On the other hand, many of the games problems – mainly the repetitive encounters, annoying kingdom management and sometimes not-so-great writing – manifest themselves even more this way. As I've said before, the story is good enough to keep you hooked, but even the greatest things become boring when repeated long enough, especially when coupled with the repetitive encounter and location design. The extreme length also means that once you make a decision, you won't be able to take it back, since reloading after you see its consequence would mean losing easily ten hours of progress (sometimes even more). Despite all its shortcomings, I must say that I've enjoyed Pathfinder: Kingmaker. The devs tried to do some things differently, which, in the end, has both its good and bad aspects; every hour of fun I 've had was paid with equal amount of frustration. I'm giving Kingmaker a 7/10 and looking forward to Wrath of the Righteous.