This game has interesting parts but boring parts. It is very long. The kingdom management sim is meh.

Character customization is crazy and you really gotta think before just blindly leveling stuff. Late game becomes really hard at higher difficulties.

Will definietely pick back up later

Intricately made CRPG that may not offer a strong-enough hook to justify spending the required 100+ hours on a single playthrough.
+ interesting large-scope premise that mixes adventuring and kingdom management
+ remarkable number of tweakable settings to adjust gameplay
+ near infinite build customizability with decent enough suggestions
+ pretty and clean UI
+ pleasant soundtrack
- one-dimensional characters who barely get a backstory or development
- simplistic story that isn't told in an exciting way
- often frustrating combat due to convoluted skills and low hit percentages

It's a good game but it's too long for a campaign for me. I lost interest when I became the Stag lord. Honestly that felt like the end of the campaign to me. I thought I'd like the ruling aspect of the game since I play games like Crusader Kings 2 and 3 that also have you build a country but in this game it just wasn't fun and I really can't explain why. This was my first experience into D&D since I have no friends irl who play the game (I'd only play D&D with friends if I played irl one day) and overall it was a great way of stepping my foot into D&D. I might finish the game one day but for now it'll be a nice little gem in my Steam library.

P.S. Another aspect of the game I found weak was characters. Some I didn't care for at all. I really liked Amiri the most but that's it. The others had potential to be great but were written kinda flat so when romance options started happening I didn't even want to romance anyone. I hadn't even spent enough time with the romance options to feel anything for them.

(I put 19.9hrs into the game on Steam before I quit)

I really wanted to try this since I just got into irl pathfinder (2), and thought it would be fun. But I forgot I really do not enjoy managing a whole party's combat in CRPG's. Specifically table top based ones, everyone just has too many spells and shit that feels reliant on already knowing the system before playing this. My brain just fogs over and all I want to do is basic attack.

Really makes me realize how good Disco Elysium is because I do enjoy dice roll dialogue, but I don't have to do combat. (Even thought all basically all I enjoy in real tabletops is the combat).

Pathfinder: Kingmaker has some cool ideas and the systems are super intricate, but it is all pulled down by repetition, length, and the cruft-filled nature of the Pathfinder rules.

This plays like a classic real-time with pause game, though I played it in turn-based mode (I don't really see how real-time can work with some of these abilities... Magus would just not be functional, right?). It is tactical and fun when it is balanced, but difficulty swings pretty wild in this game. Many encounters are overly difficult and extremely punishing for un-optimized characters. Pathfinder's prevalence of spells and abilities that do semi-permanent ability damage or full CC effects that last 10+ rounds make the game feel super unfair and pointless.
The combat is also very janky in certain ways. There are times when your actions are unclear and inputs get eaten, resulting in missed opportunities. The extreme complication of the pathfinder rules also don't lend themselves to this very much at all, since many of the options and benefits of certain abilities are basically wasted or impossible to use.
When it is working and kept fairly simple, it is still very interesting and fun, however.

The Kingmaker portion of this game is a kingdom management simulation with some interesting ideas, but not enough to really hold my attention. You can assign advisors to do events for you, but everything takes an extreme amount of time (presumably to encourage you to go out exploring while your advisors are doing things?) for very little reward. There are also hidden punishments for missing events and the amount of resources you can put into this mode is extremely limited, reducing the actual choices it feels like you can feasibly make.

Pathfinder looks good, using the style of the tabletop game to good effect. I like that it is distinct from D&D while still having a classic fantasy feel. I definitely had some random framerate issues while playing, though they didn't negatively impact the experience too much.

Character building in Pathfinder is a direct implementation of the Pathfinder rules, which would be cool if the Pathfinder rules didn't have so much unnecessary jankyness and cruft to them. The TTRPG feels like a couple of character ideas with a ton of (really boring, terrible) feats to band-aid over basic problems with the system or destroy any class uniqueness and this holds true for Kingmaker. There isn't much reason not to take the same basic set of feats for every character, most of which are astoundingly unexciting (Weapon Focus!? GREATER Weapon Focus!?!?).
It can still be fun initially to pick a character and plan out how you want to build them, but it eventually broke down pretty hard for me.

Pathfinder is HUGE. There is a map you can explore as if it were a hex crawl, with events and locations scattered throughout. Most of this is unconnected to the main story, however, and eventually started just being busy-work. Everything in the game just takes a very long time to do, from waiting for your kingdom events to happen, to traveling to your current destination. It is realistic, but definitely not fun.

I did still get some entertainment out of this game -- choosing from the different classes, building your character, and combat are all fun at first. The extreme length and lack of depth and variety in both the combat and kingdom management eventually just made me lose interest with the Pathfinder feat system being the final nail in the coffin for me.

While the pathfinder rules, gameplay elements and kingdom management all together were a bit to much of an information overload at times, the worldbuilding and story were worth it.
I believe this game is adapting a well known tabletop pathfinder campaign. What seems to be a simple rags to riches hero fantasy story, becomes something else entirely when all twists and turns are revealed. A slow burn longer than persona 5 royal. With sidestuff and companion stories included it can easily count 200 hours! What's even more insane is the fact that i have the feeling they had to scrap some content towards the end as well for budgetary reasons (Numeria gets a bit of buildup but is a big empty spot on the worldmap).
This game asks a lot of the player in a lot of aspects (time, mechanics, management, following the lore), so i wouldn't dare recommend as something anyone could like. But as an acquired taste it checked a lot of specific boxes i have a weakness for (i love DnDlike fantasy settings). It does have some flaws, and the very last dungeon is a major pain in the ass.

More a game that personally really clicked even with it's flaws. than a generally amazing game.

Добрая часть рецензий которую я читал писали что игру блять не прошли и дропнули в середине но игра им очень понравилась! У игры неплохой сценарий, её приятно читать(за исключением того что у персонажей нет голоса озвучки хихи, я напоминаю у игры бюджет был как у дивинити ориджинал син в которой каждая сука тварь была озвучена), но в это просто невозможно играть. Когда люди без зазрения совести копируют НАСТОЛЬНУЮ боёвку и суют её в игру БЕЗ изменений, это пиздец как плохо. И нет, аргумент что "мне нравится днд боёвка тупо перенесённая кому не нравится не играйте" не работает, потому что это ВИДЕОИГРА. И когда я вижу в ВИДЕО игре такую халтурно перенесённую боёвку, рыдать хочется. Короче противно в это играть, да вообще в любую изометрю противно играть после DOS2

a bit surprised by this one! a game which has languished in my steam library since i picked it up in a bundle some years ago, i had written it off as likely some soulless imperialist fantasy sim/rpg, admittedly based more or less on its title alone. as it turns out, well, after falling in love with baldur's gate this fall i started looking for more games in that vein of crpg. recently, pathfinder: wrath of the righteous appears to be the hot new thing among hardcore fans of the genre (and i must say that one looks far more appealing to me at a glance), and so i decided to give this one a chance first.

i'm pleasantly surprised. the most common complaint i've encountered is that the kingdom management aspect of the game, foisted upon you as you're tasked with the establishment of a new barony in neighboring lands infested with trolls and other monsters, bandits, and a cruel warlord, is poorly executed and a drag of a distraction from adventuring and dungeon crawling. i gather settings which automate this part of the game or render it effortless (in a difficulty setting for the management alone literally called effortless) wasn't always available, but it is now and as such i think it's perfectly fine.

what interests me more is the range you're given to be the baroness you'd like to be (within the dnd alignment system). i am loathe to be a lord of lands, but there's ample opportunity to rule with benevolence, instructing your advisors to tend to various matters before you and your party set out to make efforts in service of the people.

one thing i will warn about: character creation and early leveling are extremely daunting, even after getting a grasp on baldur's gate. the build potential is unreal. i love that shit, personally, though it does mean i end up spending hour after hour figuring it all out. a mod that lets you respec for free is an absolute must. i mean, you essentially need to have an understanding of how leveling works, how classes synergize—you select your class for every level you gain, then choose from a number of subclasses, abilities, spells, feats, etc. unless you just set it on story mode and do whatever you think seems cool, i suppose. i started as a sorcerer and later switched to a paladin with a dip into the thug subclass of rogue so that i can tank, heal, and put out the big damage with sneak attacks (which are powerful frontal attacks of opportunity, not stealth attacks). i seem to typically prefer a chaotic good mc with high charisma for games like this, and turn up my nose at lawful religious zealots, but again, in kingmaker (actually queenmaker tho) you can be a truly good person even as such. that matters to me. i don't like being evil unless it's in a game like tyranny, and even then i strive to do all the good i can for as many people as possible. big part of my enjoyment of these games, of roleplay...

might eventually amend this with further thoughts, assuming i finish it. i think i'd like to unless it really falls off later on.

A CRPG ruleset that could potentially lead to greater things in the future stapled to a terrible, mandatory 4X game. On one hand, adapting an existing campaign book probably takes a huge load off the dev team; on the other hand, you're stuck with a fundamentally simplistic story that was meant to be buoyed by the social experience of tabletop play. Every companion is one-paragraph-backstory as hell, and just have nothing interesting going on. What an utterly mindless play experience.

All this said (and after the post-launch patches and mods), it's amazingly well put together game for a studio's first release. I respect it immensely.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is a product of frustration, so much so that it inherits exceptional potential before failing on multiple fronts. Owlcat's first game of its kind, it seeks to follow in the footsteps of the greatest Baldur's Gate and other CRPGs, by offering an adaptation of Paizo's eponymous Adventure Path for their paper role-playing game. To do so, the studio launched a participative financing, which is at the root of many mistakes: in particular, the title was published far too early and, even today, there are still some particularly restrictive bugs. As in the paper version, the game takes place in the River Kingdoms, where the player embodies some adventurer in search of glory or in love with a heroic impulse, and soon finds themselves at the head of a barony that must be defended against numerous enemies. The idea is therefore to take up the division between classic exploration and management phases, which made Adventure Path quite innovative for its time. Kingdom management involves resolving critical events and opportunities to strengthen the kingdom. Although sometimes unpleasant, this phase of the game tries to enter in symbiosis with the exploration phases by guaranteeing mechanical bonuses on certain dice rolls. The concern is nevertheless that this more administrative part is compulsory to keep up with the statistics, so that a very strong time constraint is exerted on the player. This is not necessarily serious at the beginning, but in the final acts, a certain frustration can be felt, when one realizes that the management was not optimally carried out during tens of hours, resulting in a particularly arduous end of the playthrough. It then becomes apparent that kingdom management is more of a parasite on exploration, sometimes forcing one to turn away from the rather engaging stories of the companions for something that feels like a chore. For the rest, the more traditional gameplay is generally functional and initially foreshadows great things. If the non-linearity of the narrative threads and the organic side of the world shines in the first acts, the facade crumbles little by little: not so much on the side of the companions, who are all pleasant to follow, but more on the international politics, much less exploited than the beginning of the game suggested, not to mention the less and less rewarding confrontations – the Pitax arc is probably the most mediocre, as it seemed to be the highlight of the game, with all the elements sprinkled in since the first hours. The amount of bugs doesn't help and some quests were impossible to complete due to save corruptions. In trying to release a game too quickly to please the crowdfunding crowd, Owlcat sacrificed an extremely important part of the technical finishing touches and attractiveness of their world. A case in point is the quest written by a contributor about a pirate fleeing the Hellknights: it is the antithesis of what should be written for a CRPG, and the fact that Owlcat obviously made no changes to a particularly poorly written script – and the consensus is general on this issue – is a mark of a lack of professionalism. In general, Pathfinder: Kingmaker is a particularly bold adventure, in terms of the volume of material adapted, but is constantly broken by more or less serious, more or less structural problems, which make for a rather unpleasant tedium. This is not an observation I am happy to make.

Poor design cripples an almost-great game. Kingmaker attempts to faithfully emulate tabletop Pathfinder's combat (Except for a few rules which have been deliberately altered for the better, such as flanking) to the game's overall detriment. Kingdom management is a major source of frustration and while it can be automated you'll be missing out on several major mechanics. Slavish adherence to PF's rules means that most combats are minor fights intended to chew up party resources you can sleep your way through, though the spell effects from that combat will linger for ten real life minutes once that minor combat has ended. Tons of minor inconveniences and bugs add up to make an experience that, while initially promising, ends up being massively painful.