Pathfinder: Kingmaker – Enhanced Edition

Owlcat's first cRPG is everything you would expect from an Owlcat game.
Full of bugs, some game-breaking
Some of the best characters and NPCs in cRPGs
Janky animations
Hidden things everywhere, including romances and endings
Insanely difficult
Absolutely huge game world
A mind-numbingly horrendous final act/quest (house at end of time)
WTF puzzles
A metagame no one asked for (kingdom management)
Top tier storytelling and writing
The most in-depth and complex RPG and combat system you can imagine
Day night cycles and dynamic weather (*cough* come on, Larian)
Wouldn't have it any other way.

I have spent far, far, far too long with this game.
I adore it. I love it.
There is no twist to this statement, I genuinely just adore Pathfinder Kingmaker, it's character, the world and the plot.
Best 5 dollars I ever spent, and I wish I had played it sooner.

Finally! After four starts and 620 hours, I finally finished Pathfinder: Kingmaker (the entire game probably lasts about 80 hours for one playthrough). This has to be the most convoluted game I've ever played (which is not to say that it is a bad game). To rate this game based on a simple binary (yes or no) system would be grossly misleading. Pathfinder: Kingmaker requires patience... a lot of patience. If you do not like to read a lot of stuff in your games, then that's already going to create a bad experience for you.
Kingmaker looks like a regular party-based RPG like Pillars of Eternity or Divinity: Original Sin, but does does not play like that in my opinion. While PoE and D:OS have an almost intuitive feel for their game mechanics, Kingmaker's mechanics require you to read and read and respec and retry and restart and oh boy...! In a word, convoluted!
The game is quite tedious and frustrating in it's first act. The middle game is where I had the most fun given that combat becomes more accessible and dynamic compared to the first acts. The end game was exhausting.
In general the game feels like all the ideas that were put on the table during game development were just thrown into the game without any streamlining. Some people may like it, others may not. Personally, I believe that less is more with such games or, at least, streamline the systems. The morality system is one of the worst I've encountered in a game of its type/class. Combat becomes fun in the middle to endgame. The kingdom management is a unique addition to the games systems and I very much appreciated that inclusion.
The story was engaging enough that I wanted to see it through to the end, regardless of how the end game was presented.
If you like reading and figuring out systems, perhaps Pathfinder will be for you. If you prefer a game with intuitive gameplay mechanics, then I would not recommend Pathfinder. I am yet to play the second game. Hopefully, some things will be improved in that iteration.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is an isometric role-playing game developed by Russian studio Owlcat Games. Inspired by many classic rpgs like Baldur's Gate or Fallout this a great choice for every fan of the genre.
Features
- Classic tabletop with rpg elements,with great character creation with various classes ,races and abilities
- Real time combat with pause and turn based options
- Long campaign filled with intricate plots,memorable characters and significant replayability
- Huge world with detailed lore and endless amount of content to discover,unique storylines and side content
- Kingdom management system that adds an additional layer of strategy
Pros:
- Complex narrative with different story paths based on player choices,well-developed characters and immersive world
- Graphics and beautiful art style
- Challenging combat
Cons:
- Maybe too complicated ,as a beginner you need to learn a lot to understand the game mechanics
- Tedious kingdom management
- Slow pacing in combat,the burden of micromanagement in combat however this might be just my experience
My review score
Story - 10
Gameplay - 8
Graphics - 9
Sound - 9
Overall - 9

I've played through this game multiple times to get the best / secret ending. It's probably the best CRPG i've ever played. It can be frustrating at times, as there is a lot of game mechanics to get your head around. but I highly recommend it for it's character creation depth and fantastic story telling. I've tried so many times to play newer rpg's, but the writing is just impossible for me to get into. This game drove me forward to find out what was going to happen next in the story. I love going from a simple adventurer, to running a barony and then a kingdom. It's extremely immersive, and the kingdom management can be extremely stressful, which makes it feel more real. you don't just get the happy ever after, you feel like you have to fight tooth and nail for every inch of ground you win, which makes victory all that much sweeter. All decisions have weight, and you may never even know that an outcome was directly tied to an earlier decision. You get out what you put in. If you love CRPG's, you'll love this game. also I banged a Nymph

Even the imperfections had their own charm. The flaws and shortcomings added to the experience, giving everything a unique feel. I genuinely enjoyed this game.

After 2 full gameplays (the first I gave up at the very final zone years ago) and completing the game (while I finished its successor WoTR already before) I finally feel for giving a review.
Overall how I would describe Kingmaker - it is an epic cRPG. It has all the attributes you expect from such a title - it is a very large, complex, rich story with many side stories, heroic companions and fights with monsters and antagonists alike, meaningful choices that have an impact on story development with heroic or less-so-heroic deeds and choices by player.
There is also a strategic layout over the base game aka "kingdom management" that really builds up a feeling of responsibility for the country, the ability to shape it and one feels as real ruler.
In oldschool tradition game mechanics stay on a solid tabletop system (though sometimes possibly don't work exactly as tabletop and players just argue if it is intentional or bugged) Overall I would say it is among the best hand crafted tabletop experience available.
This all sounds great and such game could easily target the highest ratings... however, there are some "buts" that can be eventually very frustrating.
So what are the biggest caveats:
- kingdom management while entertaining comes together with a time-limited main quest line. It is poorly described and not always intuitive (eg. on one hand it is possible to argue that the threat of troll invasion should be dealt it with priority, but by spending time on kingdom projects and dealing with kingdom issues on fly, one can fall into the spiral where more and more issues arise, they need more and more time and attention and inevitably start the path to lose the game. If you know what to expect or simply rush for each main quest task ignoring everything else it is fine - you do what you are expected and will have fine nice progress. If you hesitate and make a few wrong choices you can find yourself in a situation where you lose the game without a chance of reverting it or having any troubles in dungeoning part.
- related to the previous is the time limit on main quests. It is reasonably long and creates a good feeling of press that drive the story and player action. However it really demand prioritization mostly in kingdom management and also has few traps for unawared player (one very obvious is the use of rations during camping vs hunting - easy to miss in camp management but hunting can take even 24 hours compared to default 8 per rest.. in time it sums up and if you will miss some 14, 30.. days in timers it is very relevant)
- For both reasons above I actually highly suggest to use Kingdom Resolution mod. Cut all kingdom event resolution time in half, reduce ruler attendance to 1 day and you will get much much enjoyable experience instead of "game over out of nowhere"
- last but not least what is major for me is game difficulty - or better say how unbalanced it is. First of all making a good character build in Kingmaker with plethora of feats, abilities and multiclass combinations is not an easy task without good knowledge of rules and practice. It dont even help most NPC companions you meet are stat inferior and require very specific builds to not feel as dead weight.
Second connected and where I hit hard walls and was frustrated most are encounters - even though there is semi-open world with opened locations, the regions are story-locked and new always unlock only in follower chapters. That is fine but encounter and monster distribution do not respect it and are placed in the world almost without any relation to the expected level that player party can have when visiting the place. That overall create situation where especially early levels might be very frustrating as with level 2 party you bump into lvl 8 monsters and so on (which can be defeated by using very good min-maxed/max buffed party or specific tactic.. otherwise it is frustrating wipefest) while especially later you go location after lcoation in "autopilot" mode where you dont need pay too much attention or use spells/abilities as 9/10 just die before you realize the details. (until you again hit some enemies that just wipe your party like nothing and you start study the encounter from scratch and look for every trick you can use...).
I would understand if this would be a case for boss/story fights but it is in fact more like random cave occupied by a trio of wererats you just found.. and once you have multiple of such encounters in a row, the balance feeling is really off (and this all is on normal difficulty with decent DnD knowledge - I would simply expect more reasonable balance experience like old Baldur gate - considering playing on normal difficulty no deep knowledge of rules should be expected and required, considering there are 3 harder difficulties still.
Also small note to bugs and performance issues - but more like their absence in my case. There is a narrative how terribly buggy the game is or how bad it has performance or loading times. I personally met only bare minimum issues in over 300 hours, maybe I just have better habits, HW configuration or different personal perception but I simply never had any issues or wrong impression others sometime present. And if there were really big issues at release I would say they are long ironed out.
So after all, despite its flaws, for me Kingmaker stays as extremely good transition of Tabletop experience, a game I always looked forward since crawling dungeons and Baldur gate 1. It also serves as basis for following WoTR title that is overall better,
Hence rating 8/10 but if someone going to buy please consider well the caveats above be sure you consider them well (I am extremely patient and RPG veteran to dealt with them - but I totally see why for someone the game can be total no go)
Also Kingmaker successor WoTR is likely better title to play today.