Pathfinder: Kingmaker Enhanced Plus Edition Review

[Michael {United Critics}]

Settings

This game is a flawed gem for me. The first important thing for me is that there are many difficulty settings so you can tailor the game to your way of enjoining RPGs and it also lets you choose when game should autopause. It was very important for me to autopause when I find something hidden or a trap or when someone in my party lose too much hp etc. It was also very important for me to set how the XP is shared in my party and to set the kingdom management setting to effortless so I could enjoy the good parts of the game.

Character Creation

There are many races and heritages and classes and archetypes and prestige classes to choose from and that is very important in any RPG. It lets the player to create his own hero and roleplay him in combat and outside of combat how he wants to. I love D&D but never played Pathfinder and some of the classes here I really like as I always liked fighters, rogues and rangers in D&D and Slayer class in Pathfinder lets me combine what I liked the most in these classes into one. I like that there are many classes like that in Pathfinder that combines other classes into one in a unique way so you can pick them instead of multiclassing.

Gameplay

Gameplay is really solid and it feels great to be an adventurer and see all the different places, travel, fight many different enemies and get stronger with time and also do all the quests and have many different options how to complete many of them. All in all gameplay is what made me play the game and ignore the bugs or push through the boring parts like kingdom management. Time limit is also generous for each chapter to do everything you want and need in each chapter. I just wish that the game would told the players that you should finish the main quest first and after that you can do all the adventuring and side quests as many people including myself are used to doing the side quests first before pushing the main quest in RPGs.

Bugs

Where to start? The most important thing is that there are still many bugs. I reported 23 bugs and 1 of them was game breaking forcing me to reload a save a few hours earlier and to do sidequests in a different order to not trigger the bug. The bug was crashing my game each time I wanted to get out of my throne room after finishing these sidequests. There are also other bugs like enemy corpses flying away or falling under ground, being able to run through the building in my kingdom instead of running around it, some points of interest that you can’t get to etc.

Companions

While there are many companions you need to do exact things in an exact time in certain locations to meet them. If you are adventuring and you are in that location before that time they will not be there and if you will get back to that location after doing some parts of the main quest it can also be too late now to meet them so in the end you need metagame knowledge to know who to meet and where and at what moment to be able to get their in your party. Also some companions are just irritating or are just a plain exaggeration of some type of political stance or ideology or personal traits. Yeah all of them have their good solid reasons to be the way they are and our actions can change them and shape them but it is strange that all of them are close to being crazy and one dimensional before meeting us. Also moral alignment for many of them is just wrong in my opinion. If you are ok with murdering the whole race I don’t think you should be lawful good. Also chaotic evil ones act more like chaotic neutral jokers and end game boss is chaotic neutral but he acts more like chaotic evil. Also it is very important to metagame to know that some of the companions will leave you at certain moments in the game and what you have to do to get them back and that at the end of the game one of them will always die and some of them will also die if you didn’t metagame your choices and didn’t pick the best possible endings for them.

Kingdom Management

Kingdom management is what made me want to quit the game a few times or made me just play some other game to have fun and than come to this game to do a few of kingdom management sessions. After finishing 1st chapter we get our kingdom and while at start managing your own kingdom sounds like fun it quickly become boring and tedious. At start you think that all the buildings are useful and all the villages you can build will be equal to each other but the more you play the more you see that most buildings are useless as they only gives you a few bonus points to kingdom stats while solving opportunities and problems with your advisors gives you much more bonus points to that stats. Also building these buildings won’t change how your kingdom looks in the game and how your villages, cities and towns look when you enter them. Sadly they will only look different in the building menu and when you are on the map before entering them. Also the best place to build all villages is close to river as the game does not tell you but building close to water gives you a special buildings you can build and a free slot for these buildings.

Most important thing is that certain buildings are closed behind your main hero moral alignment and some of these buildings are much stronger than the other ones. Bulletin board being only for lawful and stocks being only for evil are the first that comes to my mind. Bulletin board gives you +2 bonus on rolls to resolve kingdom problems and stocks gives +1. These don’t sound like much but they are huge in the end. +1 is like +2 to main stat to all of your advisors so playing as Lawful Evil gives you an option to get +3 bonus to all of your advisors. Because of how powerful that is later patches made it that if you build more than 1 bulletin board and stocks in one territory these bonuses don’t stack so you are still left with +3 bonus while before the patch you were able to stack them up and get crazy bonuses like +15 giving all your advisors 100% chance to success. On the other hand chaotic gets you a brothel that will give you +1d6-3 for diplomat and minister only so a total of -2 to max +3 for them and most of the time it will be that -2 or -1 or 0 than the bonus. Neutral just gets a fair that only gives +1 to economy for each adjacent building with economy so it is pretty much nothing as a few more points in kingdom stats in the end are worth nothing. Good gives you a hospital that gives +1 for regent and councilor so at lest that is something useful. Also being lawful not only gives you bulletin board but also a courthouse that gives you +4 bonus to Warden on kingdom problems. So in the end Lawful Evil will get the best buildings while Chaotic Neutral will get the worst ones.

Conclusion

This is a flawed gem. I have a love-hate relationship with this game. It has as much of great things as also bad and annoying things in it.

Rating: 6.5/10

Reviewer: Michael