Reviews from

in the past


Enjoying this currently. Turns out Pathfinder is a terrible system to track manually, but quite good when computers are taking care of that stuff.

Play in turn-based mode. Who saw D&D in the 90's and thought "we should make this, but without turns and you have to pause a lot."

Pathfinder Kingmaker is a CRPG that feels pride in it's table top roots and tries hard to emulate that feeling while taking inspiration from more contemporary CRPGs and I'd say they mostly succeeded in that vision with some hiccups.

1st the positives :
• The character creation is very deep, possibly overwhelming for new players. But once you get a hold of it, it's very rewarding with how much build variety can be done.
• The Pathfinder table-top rule set makes for very engaging battles. It used to be very hard at launch, relying more on rng luck but after several patches I think it's quite fair now. Using proper buffs, feats and spells to counter the enemy strength never stops being exciting.
• Without going into spoilers I'd say the story while nothing groundbreaking works well enough to keep the player invested. Each story arc has enough plot intrigue to have it's own game but since there's so many, individually they feel a bit shallow. Despite this complaint I would argue that it works to serve the larger narrative.
• Companion characters have actual personality with history and are not just stand ins for their race, this I greatly appreciated. I loved the camp side banter and how they can interject during story moments. Having to have them in party for romance to trigger properly was nice too.
• Kingdom management mini game is quite fun with choices than can have consequences with the companions. Watching your city having the buildings you built show up in the map screen never got old for me. Small side quests from unlocked locations were nice too.
• The visual design is gorgeous with perfect use of special effects. Using powerful AOE spells never got old. But I wish the game had camera rotation like D:OS2.
• Voice acting for the most part was great and added to the immersion. Though I wish important story dialogues weren't half voiced, either keep it silent or voice it fully. Having to hear half dialogues in great voice acting and having to imagine the rest took me out of experience slightly, though this is a minor nitpick.
• The music, my god. Inor Zur is a genius and it shows. Every tracks fits the game ambience just right and quite a few of those I would listen to ousdide of the game too.

Now for the parts that in my opinion can be improved:

• 1st point has to be bugs. I'm glad how much the devs have worked to fix the bugs and balance issues of the game but still there is some work to be done. I ran into 2 broken quest that was supposed to be fixed and a few visual glitches here and there. Saving takes too much time and it needs to be fixed, taking 7-8 seconds for a quick save during later parts of the game is unacceptable. Fortunately there's a mod.
• Although visually gorgeous, I'm not that impressed with level design. Specially during earlier positions of the game you get kinda bland maps purely carried by the quest story you have in mind instead of visual story telling. 1st World was a breath of fresh air but even that went stale soon. Also I feel they are too open and lack strategic use like in POE, but it will be a very subjective opinion. Unique locations aside from main quest that have optional bosses often reuses same locations. Maybe this where the kickstarter budget shows most.
• The companions need more flavor text to flesh them out. After you initially meet and talk with them, there's nothing to talk about for 20-30 hours before their companion quest kicks in and even then it's just a couple of lines at most. At the least they should have dialogues after each important story event. Also longer dungeons needs some side story in the form of notes or something. Idk about others but fighting similar enemies over and over without discovering fun stuff about the location is boring. I hope the story's better in the future games too.
• There are unsual difficulty spikes in the game, specially towards the end. Hopefully will get more balance patches.
• A personal grievance but I dislike the over reliance on RNG in everything. I know that's how table top games are probably but on higher difficulties you are forced to reload not because you did something wrong but because the enemy just had a higher roll than you. That is not fun. I'm so glad DOS2 moved away from it although armor system needs some fixing.

Overall it's very fun game and a solid entry into the CRPG genre.

An isometric RPG based on the Pathfinder license, specifically taking a lot of elements from the tabletop Pathfinder adventure path campaign of the same name. Launched with a lot of problems and bugs that have mostly been ironed out since then. A well done translation of the system's rules with good class variety for the first time making a game in the setting. The added ability to switch between turn based and active combat is a great feature.

Can actually be challenging and require tactical thinking and knowledge of the ruleset, even more so on harder difficulties. Using spells and buffs and debuffs can be very important, having a dimension door ready to cast if you suddenly get surrounded or ambushed is really useful, taking spells that slow, entangled, or trap enemies with things like the grease or pitfall spells. Open fights on enemies that haven't seen you yet by having your ranged characters begin their attack animations then pause before they fire to charge your melee fighters so everyone is hitting enemies while they have the flatfooted status. Move your more defense focused characters in front of areas and physically block enemies with their body while attacking over them with ranged and reach weapons.

Good use of skill checks and alignment options (with some questionable classification, and sometimes a lack of certain options causing your alignment to be pushed in a direction you don't want) with some story options or easier ways to get through events requiring you to be follow a certain path (lawful, good, neutral, chaotic, or evil). Good companions (Jubilost was great), lore, artwork, animations, lighting, weather effects, and music. There is a wide variety of weapons, armors, and equipment that make using any class and any weapon viable (though there are certain weapons with a lot more options or with unique gear that fits a certain class) and the weapons and armors have a lot of visual differences. A large number of voiced camping conversations between party members that help to highlight their personalities, though each one is oddly limited to having only one line between two characters or two lines from one character making some feel very abrupt. I like the storybook scenes that were also done in some other recent games like Torment Tides of Numenera and Pillars of Eternity where you make choices and skill checks in a choose your path adventure kind of thing, though they don't allow you to make use of the skill enhancing spells, abilities, or bard songs that the game has in the normal mode but that are made more for the described events.

A fairly helpful quest journal and and map that marks locations that have new events and some useful additions like telling you the location where you found many of your items (very nice to have when looking for relics that share a name but are scattered in different areas), though there are some quests that mark a map location when it really wants you to find a random encounter on the overworld. When you are gaining new spells when you level up it will show you every other character that currently has access to that spell already, helpful if you are trying to have a variety of abilities. Difficulty options allow a variety of playstyles and to even skip kingdom management.

As you would ideally want to do in a tabletop roleplaying game they hint at information ahead of time that can help you. Passing perception checks, looking at descriptive text on bodies, tracks, or other objects you can interact with can give you an idea of enemies or traps you might face and how to prepare for them (spells like resist energy and slow poison are extremely useful), you get told that names of people can be a powerful thing to know and if you are thinking then shortly after when someone asks who you are supposed to be you might know that telling them your name might not be the best idea, a companion betrays you at one point and if you have been listening to camp dialogue you might have realized that a lot of your party members (even the ones with similar alignments) just don't seem to like or trust him or mention that he doesn't seem knowledgeable about where he says he is from.

A terrible introduction to Kingdom management with long advisor opening events being given immediately that you have no reason to do anytime soon (or ever) as well as having very limited advisor options for certain positions. The entire Kingdom management isn't that well thought out, there is nothing wrong with your advisor choices and you can see some differences in how each of your potential advisor choices handle different situations but events repeat, advisors you should be able to use on certain tasks aren't allowed to be used, actually creating buildings in your towns is fairly pointless, trade agreements if done early will take the length of almost the entire game to pay off (assuming you looked online to see how many years the game lasts) and if done late will waste you massive amounts of time and money, worse is that none of the buildings or trade agreements even effect your ending economy/relation/citizenry/etc slides and the endings you can get don't always make much sense based on the choices you made.

The game doesn't always present info well such as not telling you what status effects do when looking at spell, condition, or battle information, turn based mode not showing you useful info for certain classes well to let you know if they are going to use their abilities correctly. Some status effects gave no information, trying to look at spells outside of the spellbook or a spot where you can right click for more info will just bring up a popup that will often cut off early before giving you the information you need. It would be nice if things just told you what they were given you right now based on your stats instead of just describing how it works. You can't choose to end spells early or to cast and hold onto touch spells. There is some translation issues every now and then, nothing that makes it difficult to understand just some missing words, incomplete phrases in English, or two words meaning the same thing used after another that seemed to get worse in the final chapter (most mistakes would just be things like "I the leader here", "this will be our final last battle").

A very long, and highly reactive to your choices, game with a lot of places to explore, though with some of those places basically being the exact same map just with different enemies and items on it (you will see a lot of the same looking enemy den locations). Companions have a lot of dialogue and, depending on the situation and who is with you, might even join in conversations when you fail diplomacy checks to help you. The wide variety of build options and needing knowledge of Pathfinder feats and skills is a lot more difficult to know in a video game that doesn't show you up front that it isn't going to include certain things or that not every niche skill works as it should (a much more common problem at launch). For a smaller team that was just using Kickstarter to get $500,000 and ended up with $900,000 it's a very ambitious game that launched with a lot of issues but ended up being very good for the most part.

There seems to be an issue with this game and the new one where unity added some file having to do with your mouse over a year ago that causes the cursor to jump around at random while in the game or while it is on and minimized. Don't know why they won't fix it but you can just go the games files and delete a plugin file Rewired_DirectInput.dll to fix the problem. Highly recommended to use a SSD due to the frequent loading in what already ended up being one of the longest games I've played (if you are trying to complete everything and to view different possible outcomes).

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1451963094167535620

Of nearly all of the modern CRPGs I've tried, this one is the best. Better than Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, Torment Tides of Numenera, Divinities, Shadowruns, Solasta. The only exception to this is Disco Elysium, but that game wrestles in it's own category altogether.
(Note: I haven't played Wrath of the Righteous yet, so this opinion may yet change.)

I've often felt that the more modern (3rd edition onward) iterations of DnD would be more fun on a video game than on the table, and this game seems to bear that out. It really feels like a sincere translation of the modern TTRPG experience: the extensive character building, the tactical challenge of combat, the character development power fantasy of 1-20 (ish, I only managed to get to lvl 18 by the end), combined with an enjoyable adventure story, world exploration and fun companions.

The scope of this game is immense and ambitious, which gives the game a great sense of adventure. You're given a relatively huge map to explore point-crawl style. Time passes during travel, and camping, lending to a certain amount of verisimilitude for the world, as the main quests do come with time limits (though the time limits never seemed particularly oppressive as long as you're prioritizing the order in which you do things).
The camping system in itself is the best I've seen in any CRPG; you assign party roles for watches, hunting, cooking, hiding the camp. Random encounters can take your camp by surprise, especially in more dangerous areas. This is an important part of a TTRPG adventure to me, and too many CRPGs opt to turning resting into some kind of an automatic heal-button, but not this game. You companions even have small conversations during camping, which adds a nice bit of flavor. It really does feel like taking a party to an adventure, much more so than any other CRPG I've played.

The gameplay is classic CRPG fair of party based dungeon crawling and tactical combat. The main difference maker here is that Kingmaker lets you switch between turn-based and realtime with pause on the fly, which is something I hope every modern CRPG does from now on. You can use real-time when you know a few on the fly commands combined with party AI will get the job done, and turn on turn based for more challenging encounters that require more granular control of what your party is doing.
Those challenging encounters can be very challenging indeed, and the game does have some difficulty spikes that may feel jarring. Frequent saving is advisable because the game does not pull it's punches. I do think many people are overstating the difficulty though, I never really felt like I was sucker punched with a completely unfair encounter, and I never had to revert a significant amount of progress due to difficult encounters.
The combat is some of the more satisfying CRPG combat that I've played, mostly owing to the faithfulness to the TTRPG system. There's a wide array of tactical choices at your disposal, and the game tests your knowledge of it's systems regularly, though it doesn't always present information to you that well.
I do have to say, though, that at time the combat encounters can become somewhat of a slog. Some dungeons are quite long and consist of a lot of repeated encounters of defeating groups of the same enemies one after the other. The pacing of the game could do with some tightening, and though I appreciate it's immense scope, it doesn't really need to be as long as it is.

The main story is fun. It is nothing groundbreaking to be sure, but it sets a good stage for your exploration of the Stolen Lands, and the journey itself is satisfying. A lot of it is pretty classic fantasy stuff: trolls, owlbears, fey and kobolds and the like. Personally, I've come to appreciate the more classic tropes like this. Dialogue gives you a nice amount of options of using your skills and stats for certain dialogue options, and the game gives you nice freedom of roleplaying the kind of character you want to be. Each companion comes with it's own set of quests that resolve throughout the lengthy game, and most of them go through some nice development.

The Kingdom Management will be an acquired taste, to be sure. It doesn't feel tacked on exactly, and I wasn't annoyed by its inclusion, but it is also not particularly deep and I can definitely see how some players might it gets in the way of the actual adventuring content. There is an option to let the game handle it, I didn't test that option out so I don't know how that affects the experience and whether you end up missing some content if you do automate it. It was an interesting experiment, and definitely suits the story this game tries to tell, but it doesn't completely hit its mark.

Overall, this is a robust and faithful TTRPG experience in a video game format, and the most worthy successor to games like Baldur's Gate out of the modern offerings. The game is incredibly ambitious and I'm shocked at how well it succeeded in what it set out to do.


This review contains spoilers

This game ticks aaall my boxes but for some reason I didn't love it the way I thought I would.

Although I've never played Pathfinder, I'm a huge fan of similar TTRPGs and must say this was a stunning CRPG. I'm also a sucker for Kingdom management so you won't hear me complain about that.

In classic me-fashion, I will say that I LOVED this game up until the end. Then came House at the Edge of Time (?) and it was as if all momentum just... died. It was such a colossal pain in the ass that a few hours in, I died and reincarnated as a spiteful ghost of my former self that is now writing this review. Luckily Nyrissa girlbossed gatekept gaslighted the rating up half a notch

Have considered buying it on sale many times, but glad I waited and got it for free. A fun game, but a time enough at last situation.

yeah uhhh cancer combat balancing (i am not familiar with the pathfinder edition mechanic)
also can't romance barbarian girl

o jogo deu pau e não da mais pra jogar, mas foi divertido enquanto durou, nos vemos na proxima

Eine Endlose Anzahl an Würfelfehlschlägen...
Die Dialoge sind zum Vergessen, das Leveln macht keinen Spaß. Keine Ahnung, was man hier empfehlen könnte..

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.

good combat, balancing was handled by a 5 year old and i honestly just dont care enough to finish it.

glitchy as fuck too

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.

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.

Best thing trying to emulate the Baldur's Gate CRPG's from the late 90's. It's as unfair as those games too (but you can turn the difficulty).

As far as CRPGs go, it isn't the worst. The combat is fairly solid, though its missing some notable and important tabletop abilities like the ability to dismiss spells, important for control casters, and teleport spells, making it difficult to navigate the kingdom quickly. That's not why I'm abandoning the game though; after 5 chapters, I've had enough of the kingdom building. It amounts to nothing more than a chore that you need to do to prevent a game over. Sure you CAN disable it, but then you're losing access to a decent amount of game features and items that are integrated into the kingdom building. Further, while CRPGs are long, and I'm fine with that, there feels like there's a lot of padding in Kingmaker; from bonus dungeons to quest after quest after quest, despite not finishing the game I have more hours clocked in it than far better CRPGs. As much as I did enjoy the plot, characters, and combat, the tediousness of it just kills my wanting to finish it.

This is one of those lovable janky titles.

It lacks polishand has glitches here and there. Some solutions to problems are really obscure too. And the game is also really unbalanced. It is totally unclear what kind of built is worth shit and what isn't and the game gets way too hard, way to fast. Even on normal.

But, on the other side, this game has loads and loads of content, a captivating story, motivating side quests and side activities, extremely unique and interesting compagnions and just about anything you'd want from a masterclass CRPG.

Unfortunately, the problems that plague this game are simply to extreme for it to be labeled as such.
And because of that, I would put it right at the edge of the top-tier.
As one of those pretty great RPGs, that aren't quite really great :D

But still: Highly recommended for any fan of the CRPG Genre.

I would give this game a 5/5 if wasn't the Kingdom Managment because otherwise, it's a almost perfect CRPG.

Total joy to play when you aren't working in Kingdom Management.. Can't recomend enough, but please do yourself a favor and add some mods.

speaking as someone who loves pathfinder 1e the tabletop system as well as crpgs. this game is just not that good, but its taunting how almost good it is.

some of the characters are great, some fall flat. the adaptation of several classes and mechanics from pathfinder are great, some mechanics are missing, and some shouldve been reworked or left behind on the tabletop. the level design and quests are almost really cool, but plagued by numerous trash fights in a system that really suffers from that. i wouldve much rather had a more faithful adaptation of pf1e as a turn based game, no matter how much i love real time games like pillars of eternity.

The best CRPG you will ever play.

Its still kinda buggy but id say its worth a try.

Pathfinder Kingmaker is another game in the cRPG 'renaissance' of the past six years, and one that I have been slowly playing over the past year or so (jeez!). So you may have noticed the "beaten" tag on this one - yeah 80 hours in and I still have not finished the game. In fact, I'm still only in Act 4 of 7. Now, about 20~25 hours of that is my original playthrough from when I first got the game but I restarted a couple of months back when I decided to really give it another go. So this is another game I did not really finish per the intent of this challenge, but I put such a time investment into it and I have such thoughts about it that I'm going to count it anyway, alright???

So the time invested here presents an interesting conundrum - if I liked it enough to play 80 hours, why didn't I finish it? I've played really long games before, why not this one? If I got so damn tired of it I didn't want to even keep playing any more (despite setting the entire Kingdom mechanic on auto and using cheats to speed along several other parts of the game) then I must not have liked it right? Well it's complicated alright! So much of the game is great - the combat is damn damn good, the writing is overall pretty solid, companions are all at least pretty good, the art style is pleasant and the music is near enough to top notch. So what's the hold up, Modest? The pacing is fucking garbage, that's what.

While most cRPGs post-2000s I feel are in some way a response to Baldur's Gate, either in aping or repudiating it (a pretty simple judgement on my part but stick with me) and Kingmaker is VERY much a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate I, even moreso than BG2 itself was. Kingmaker is all about having an expansive world map and making your way about, making discoveries, having random combat encounters and meeting strange new folk - adventure!! And in a way, it does that exceptionally well. It is more 'open world' than I believe any other game I have played and it is stuffed to the brim with content. And all that stuff you find? It's pretty darn good, most of the time. Interesting enemies, engaging story or characters, ethical dilemmas... But there's JUST. SO. MUCH. The world map could take upwards of 5~ minutes to walk across WITHOUT any encounters along the way and you're just watching your pawn slide across the exact same map you've been looking at for dozens of hours... There's a main story of course, and companions who follow you who have their own story, but honestly that must account for MAYBE 10-15% of my play time? The amount of sheer BUSYWORK is just neverending.

Speaking of neverending busywork - the entire Kingdom management mechanic. Is it neat in its own way? Of course it is! You get to pick your advisors in each area of ruling to handle the little shit, and every few days a problem comes to you in the throneroom and you get to rule on it. Sounds neat? It is! Then it happens 1000 times in the first 30 hours and basically none of it means a single god damn thing other than the kingdom stats notching up and down a few points and you just get tired... Oh and you have to watch all the same little animations over and over and over each time....

So to get to the main point - nothing about Pathfinder Kingmaker is bad. But on the flip side - basically nothing is genuinely GREAT either. The combat gets pretty close but only with the turn based mod - and that ends up just slowing down the proceedings even more. The characters are pretty good, but no one is great. The art is nice, but generic. The quests you stumble over are at least a bit interesting, but nothing that genuinely pulls the heart strings or gets the blood pumping. The main quest line is very good and all but it is at most 20% of the actual content you will be DOING in the game which makes it tiring to slog towards. Also there is 'missable' events in your kingdom that can lower your stats and potentially end the game, which makes skipping time towards the main content feel risky each time you do it..

It's been a long time since I did this, stopping a game only most of the way through to review it. With Sekiro and Mario Odyssey last year though it was due to pretty bitter disappointment - with Pathfinder its more a bittersweet resignation - I quite liked everything the game had to offer - it just went too far out of its way to keep me wading through mud to get to the good stuff.


Amazing isometric RPG with a steep learning curve and a complex combat system. It has a great story, but stretches for a tad too much time imo. Took me about 150 hours to finish it, doing most of the content and playing on normal difficulty.

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.

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).


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 played this game to completion, taking me more than 300 hours. The gameplay itself is about average, maybe slightly below average for a CRPG. The story and character work though, are some of the most odious, overwhelming, ideologically appalling stuff I've ever seen in a game. A constant doubling down on and making worse of classic issues in fantasy to frustrating ends.

you don't get it, you don't HAVE TO engage with all of the irredeemably shitty parts of the game

me divertí mucho, la formula de amenaza para tu reino de la semana es muy buena y siempre estaba expectante a lo que siguiera, si bien tiene muchas fallas en el sistema de reino hizo que me viciara de manera increíble. decae al final como la gran mayoría de los RPG pero el final es épico.
nok-nok mejor compañero