I've rarely been engrossed in an RPG like this one. This one goes up with the best RPG experiences of all time for me. I rate it better than my favorites Baldurs Gate and Baldurs Gate 2. While I don't give this better marks than Witcher 3 (I mean... seriously I don't see how you could), this title is supremely worthy of purchase to anyone who calls themselves an RPG fan.

I could go on and on about how interesting the character building is in this game, but its probably one of the more frustrating aspects of the title. Their are so many choices, its difficult to fit all of them in, in a single play through. While I do consider their to be some balancing issues between physical/melee and ranged/magic, I do imagine that player mods will one day solve this.

If players committed to making engrossing campaigns (or the developers continued to add-on to this title) I'd be set in my deeply-rooted RPG needs for years to come.

Kudos to them for actually coming up with a storyline that interested me, and wasn't filled with standard fantasy tropes. I really enjoyed this, despite not having completed it yet. This is a magical title and you need to buy it, even if you don't enjoy this particular style of game.

Should instead be called Pathfinder: Route to Maximize Your Sadomasochistic Tendencies.

The pacing in this "game" is awful. By any standards. Adherence to a tedious rulesystem might be fun for the D&D Guildmaster with no control over his own life (and thus the derived pleasure from telling others what the rules are), but in a PC game its probably the worst way to achieve any semblance of "fun".

After reaching level 2, I discovered that fighting 18 random and planned battles wasn't enough to hit level 3. In every other game, the number of encounters needed before you leveled was not only lower, but the fights didn't feel nearly as inconsequential as these did. You can only have so many fights with "Bandits" before wondering how any banditry was ever accomplished. I've yet to run into anyone who isn't a bandit traversing the woods, and assume "Banditry" is just another word for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Thats right, Pathfinder: Kingmaker is populated by a vibrant menagerie of regular and fantastical creatures, and 1500 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. The only regular NPCs in the game seem to constrain themselves to the opening castle (where they are very nearly all killed by the 99% population of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥) and one trade outpost where the total population is 2 (and then 3 and then 4). Basically this world is as uninspired as your worst fantasy novel. But wait... we aren't talking about the story.

The number of combats I've run into that are trivial, are almost sufferable in the face of the ones that are unnecessarily difficult. One of the first bosses you run into is a swarm of spiders (actually 3 of them). On normal difficulty, none of my weapons did any damage to them. They were immune to nearly all of the spells made available to me by the forced design of my party (you don't get to truly pick who joins your party nor can you dictate their design). These spider swarms were immune to every tool I had in my arsenal.

I then remembered reading in the loading tooltips that swarms are weak to "torches" and proceeded to go rebuy the torches I had sold (torches are usually pointless in games like this) to a vendor. Then the best thing happened. I was able to damage the spider swarms! 1HP at a time. Unfortunately the spider swarms hit harder than that. My brave torch-wielders were slowly overcome, unable to do enough damage to take out this overwhelming threat.

If you want to know my feelings on combat in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and haven't guessed yet... This statement should sum it up: Spider Swarms are the defacto most powerful enemy a group of 6 people can't handle. I can take down an imposing bear-treant boss that was in fact very difficult and challenging (and I guess rewarding when it finally died 8 reloads later), but not Spider Swarms. Anytime 100 of these criters get together and want to kill you, there is nothing a group of 6 level 3's can do about it. The world is doomed.

And thats just one ridiculous fight in what I assume is a trend that will never end in this game.

Poor pacing. Poor combat design. Poor fixation on implementing verbatim tabletop rules. All of which leads to a terrible experience on PC. It would be one thing to experience all of this in a "strict adherence to table top rules" mode, but no... I played on Normal. Normal. You read that right, Normal difficulty.

Don't even get me started on their customized "rules" which explain absolutely none of this nonsensical adherence to the Pathfinder tabletop religion.

Finally, what little of the game I've managed to slog through thus far has presented a world which is comically void of life. Oh sure you'll find monsters everywhere. NPCs? Nah. The starting "city" you begin in, is nothing more than a throne room. Its devoid of life, and thats before the afforementioned ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ army knocks on its front door. The game is comically designed to set your character up as the defacto ruler of an area populated by a billion ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and the invincible spider swarms that somehow haven't killed all of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to date.

While I enjoy the notion of becoming a Kingmaker and ruling an empire, I haven't even gotten to the supposed core part of the game yet. Kingdom management. I've seen a dozen tooltips about it, but because someone doesn't know how to design a fun experience decided to put Spider Swarms inbetween me and the throne? I guess I'll never know.

Making matters worse, I've discovered all of these issues within the first 10 hours of play. The lead designer has apparently already acknowledged some of my complaints. If only a process existed to catch these issues before people bought your game. Like some sort of testing phase or something where you could invite players to give you meaningful constructive criticism, before you started charging money for it.

I hope one day someone invents this "testing" phase. This game sorely needed it.