Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous – Enhanced Edition
About This Game
Discover the Story
Your path will lead you to the Worldwound, where the opening of a rift to the Abyss has unleashed all-consuming terror across the land. For over a century, the neighboring nations have fought fearlessly, trying to drive the enemy back — but to little avail.
Now, you have the chance to put an end to this conflict, but the path to salvation is far from clear-cut. Will you become a shining angel, backed by noble paladins? Or a powerful necromancer with hordes of immortal undead in your thrall? Or something else entirely? Lead your army and challenge mighty demon lords. Your crusade will set in motion a chain of events that will leave you — and the world itself — forever changed.
PLAY YOUR HERO, YOUR WAY
Create any character imaginable with the flexibility, richness, and depth of the Pathfinder First Edition ruleset. Choose from 25 classes, 12 character races, and more than a thousand spells, feats, and abilities to suit your personal playstyle.
FOR EVERY CHOICE, A CONSEQUENCE
Your decisions have more weight than ever before. Your goal is clear, but you must forge your own path to it. Who will die, and who will live? Who will stay, and who will go? Make your choices, and watch the world around you change.
A NEW WAY TO FIGHT
Enjoy two combat modes as you slay your enemies – real-time with pause or turn-based. Switch between them on the fly, so you can always take things as slowly — or as quickly — as you like. The unique Pathfinder ruleset also allows you to perform advanced combat maneuvers, like mounted combat. Use them wisely!
GATHER YOUR PARTY
A cast of more than 10 unique companions is ready to join your cause. Earn their trust and respect, and they will have your back no matter what dangers lie ahead. And if you get on their bad side, well… Maybe it’s time to part ways.
LEAD THE CRUSADE
You will need much more than a party of adventurers to cleanse the land of its demonic scourge. Take command of the crusaders and lead them to victory – both as a strategist, controlling the battle from above, and as a field commander, in a new tactical combat mode.
CHOOSE YOUR PATH
Explore nine unique Mythic Paths: obtain extraordinary abilities and shape everything that comes next. Your decisions might transform you into a celestial Angel, a raging Demon, a powerful Lich, a cunning Trickster, an otherworldly Aeon, a rebellious Azata, a wise Gold Dragon, an insatiable Swarm That Walks — or remain mortal and walk the arduous path toward becoming a living Legend.
Game Discussion
Chief 0
Awesome game. Didnt have so much diving into role-playing for very long time. Thousands of small details in game design keep you entertained as the story goes and in every aspect of it game developers added something new. Cons are: so many features can't be without bugs / UX problems. But still very enjoyable.
Steam User 285
This review is a hard one for me.
I LOVE this game, clearly. I wouldn't have spent 450 hours playing it if I didn't. Pathfinder WOTR is a great game...but there are many aspects in which it is not a "good" game, which is what makes it difficult to recommend unless you are a particular kind of person.
I, like many other people, came to WOTR after playing Baldur's Gate 3. Prior to BG3, I did not have any experience with D&D, Pathfinder, or any CRPGs. My only TTRPG experience was a single campaign of Call Of Cthulhu, and 90% of my video games were racing games like Forza, Trackmania, etc.
WOTR is mechanically much more technical than BG3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2 (another contemporary competitor from Larian). There are far more classes/subclasses, the way stat bonuses are calculated is much more nuanced, there are multiple types of AC that you must consider, and there are an incredible amount of feats to choose from - just to name a few things. It is very easy to create a character build that doesn't work well, and the game is not forgiving. Unlike BG3, you cannot fully respec your companions (you can only reset them to the level & class they were when they first joined your party), you can only respec a limited amount of times before it costs gold, and the ability to respec is completely removed on harder difficulties. The game does provide some "automatic" builds for your companions if you don't want to think about it, but they aren't amazing. Once you learn what does and does not work for builds, you can create some pretty powerful characters, and there are so many classes and abilities in WOTR that I wish were possible in BG3 (e.g. the bloodrager class, or animal mounts). If you like nerding out over character sheets, you will love WOTR.
The gameplay is pretty solid for the most part. I mostly use turn-based mode, and I love that I can hit the spacebar to make animations go faster. While I don't use RTwP mode much for combat, it does reduce the amount of time you spend in battle - which is nice, since there are a LOT of battles, to the point where it can sometimes feel kind of grind-y. The "fog of war" visibility took some getting used to, and I admittedly prefer how BG3 and DOS2 handle visibility when you're exploring instead. Characters are pretty dumb when it comes to pathfinding - they'll walk right over traps and spells without even trying to avoid them. The maps are...fine...but I feel like BG3 and DOS2 have better-designed encounters with maps and arenas that encourage you to strategize for fights, while the norm in WOTR is to just walk up to your enemies and start hitting them - even the bosses. The puzzles suck and I recommend just looking up the solutions in online guides rather than wasting time trying to figure them out (especially Nenio's whole quest...ugh...).
The difficulty in WOTR is mostly designed around pumping up the stats of your enemies (especially AC) and throwing a bunch of them at you, rather than forcing you to come up with tactics and adapt on the fly to defeat them like BG3 and DOS2 do. The fights are also balanced so that you are expected to buff before them and quicksave after them. If you find a fight or dungeon to be too difficult, there is nothing stopping you from opening the pause menu and dropping the difficulty (which affects enemy stats too), and then raising it back up if you want later. Nobody will know.
Graphically, WOTR is fine. DOS2 is older but looks better, and BG3 runs just as well on my system despite being newer and much more pretty. The character models are pretty low-quality up close. WOTR isn't ugly though, and there are areas where I think it does better than DOS2 - like AOE status effects. In terms of stability, I think I've only had it crash on me once or twice, and otherwise I haven't really had any bugs aside from one part of Pulura Falls where a character always gets stuck in the corner of one particular room. Owlcat is still releasing patches every few months which is nice to see.
The story differs depending on which "mythic path" you choose. I've personally played Aeon, Azata, Demon, and Dragon. The different stories are of varying quality, but I will say that the Demon story is a lot of fun if you're looking to do a "corruption" arc or "evil" character, and I found the Aeon story to be really satisfying for a lawful-alignment character. The Dragon story was lackluster, but mechanically it was a lot of fun to play. I wasn't a fan of the Azata story but I know some people out there really like it. All of the mythic paths share the same "true ending," although that ending is extremely difficult to achieve organically due to the crazy amount of intricate steps you have to take to reach it. Otherwise, they have unique endings, and many have sub-paths that affect outcomes as well (for example, the Aeon path will categorize you as "True," a "Rebel," or a "Devil" depending on the choices you make). Your companions will have different outcomes for their own stories too depending on your choices with them, although these are integrated so well that you often won’t know it unless you've done multiple playthroughs.
WOTR requires a lot of reading. If you've come this far in my review, I'm assuming that's not a problem. There is some voice acting, but only during important story dialogues, and even then it may suddenly vanish in the middle of the conversation because those particular lines weren't recorded. The story writing is generally good quality albeit overly wordy (like this review), but the character dialogue often leaves something to be desired. I’ve had several friends who tried to get into WOTR but gave up because it "had too much reading," so this is your warning.
The elephant in the room is Crusade Mode. It's not fun. There is an "auto-crusade" option that lets you avoid it, but turning it on locks you out of the "true ending" and it also limits how quickly you can progress through quests. The interface is also terrible and there are SO many loading screens. There's one when you open the map, one when you switch to the Crusade Management screen, one when you switch back to party/army management, and then one once you finally reach your destination on the map itself. That doesn't include any loading screens from random encounters en route to your destination. Fast travel also doesn't exist until you unlock bastions and build teleporters. Even then, you can only use it once per day, and only to those specific locations where you built the teleporters. This makes Chapter 3 and Chapter 5 feel like a bit of a slog without mods.
WOTR was crowdfunded on Kickstarter with a budget of about $2 million, releasing in 2021. DOS2 was also crowdfunded on Kickstarter with a budget of about $2 million, releasing in 2018. DOS2 feels like a much more polished game with full voice acting, nicer graphics, better performance (and fewer loading screens), and more effort put into its maps and encounters. WOTR has a much greater scope than DOS2, which is both a blessing and a curse - yes, it allows CRPG/TTRPG nerds to go all-out, but sometimes it feels as if Owlcat bit off more than they could chew. I personally think that the game would have been far better off without Crusade Mode, since it would have allowed the developers to focus more of their time/budget on things like balancing, writing/voice acting, the map, and graphics/performance.
If you do pick this up, I recommend downloading the Toybox and Visual Adjustments 2 mods. Toybox allows you to re-spec for free and also enables a lot of quality-of-life features that aren't present in the base game (and it can be used to cheat in Crusade Mode...). Visual Adjustments 2 allows finer customization of your character's appearance.
You can often pick the base game up for $12 USD on sale. If you're the kind of person who gets really invested in this type of game, that's a steal.
Steam User 170
This is a fantastic cRPG. If you enjoy other cRPGs, you are very likely to enjoy this one as well. However, some parts of the game are really lacking. I have a lot of criticism, but I still love the game and I really liked playing it.
OwlCat's game-designers do not value your time at all. The game is filled with tedious routine, but thankfully you can fix it with mods. Several times I tried to play this game unmodded, but each time I was getting frustrated and giving up. Last time I finally came to a conclusion that other people must've felt the same way, and thus there must be mods to fix these problems. So, mods are a necessity, with them game really begins to shine. Do not try to play unmodded, it's a pain.
Here's the list of mods that I consider must-have.
- Toybox. This brings some quality-of-life features, e.g. highlighting nicknames of important NPCs. Also it enables back achievements (that are normally disabled if you play with mods). Also Toybox basically gives you root-access to the game, which might be really important in some cases, In my case, in the 2nd act I forgot to speak with a certain NPC (because there was no entry in journal, or maybe I haven't waited for enough time for this quest to progress, who knows). Anyway, at the very end of the game I realized that a certain companion quest got locked in a bad-end-state because of that. And, like, sure, I could replay half of the campaign just to fix it, but was it worth it? 50 hours are quite a lot of time just to get a better ending for a certain character. So I edited a certain variable, and it fixed the companion quest for me. Too bad i had to cheat to achieve that. Another example is that for a certain event I would need to arrive in a specific location at a certain week, which required me to skip several months of in-game time. Game allows you to skip time day-by-day, but it is way slower. With this mod it was done in a matter of seconds.
- BubbleBuffs. Buffing before every battle is a necessity, but it is freaking boring. Who thought that it is fun? Why is it even a thing that pre-buffing is mandatory? This mod saves you a lot of time by providing a hotkey for buffing your characters with spells that you've picked.
- AutoMount. Every time you enter a new area, you need to manually mount all your animal companions. Imagine how tedious it becomes when half your party has animal companions. Click your character, then click "mount" ability, then find and click your animal. Repeat for every melee character that has animal companion. This mod, however, auto-mounts your animal companions every time you enter a new area, and provides hotkeys for mounting and dismounting the whole party.
- Respec Mod. Allows you to respec your allies from the 0-level, as if they were mercs. It is quite important, because most of the NPCs have retarded builds that you cannot redo or fix. So normally you either play a sub-optimal party of characters with backgrounds and personalities (and suffer in combat encounters), or you hire mercs (and get no interesting dialogs, missing a significant part of the game). With this mod, however, you get both dialogs and optimal team composition at the same time.
Steam User 92
Played BG1-3, NWN1/2, and other rpgs and this was by far the most bloated in terms of complexity without improvement. Just too many options, feats, classes, modifiers, way too many gd buffs to keep track of and cast. Asking a lot of the player to manage a 6 character party in such a mess of a system. Realized I'm not a fan of pathfinder 1E after playing this.
Despite all that, I did have fun and enjoy the story until getting burned out of the buff mania late campaign. Got my money's worth so that deserves a recommend.
Steam User 64
Back in 2019, I finished Pathfinder: Kingmaker with mixed feelings. It was an amazingly challenging, deep game with unique mechanics, but I find games with overall time limits to be very stressful, and I struggled to complete the final section without lowering the difficulty, both of which ultimately left a sour taste in my mouth. Therefore, I did not immediately jump on Wrath of the Righteous upon its release. However, I eventually heard that there was no time limit in the sequel, and as I am a big CRPG fan, I decided to give it a chance after all.
The first thing that I would emphasize is that this absolutely is not a game for everyone, even if you're a habitual CRPG player. Many of its strengths can also be seen as weaknesses or flaws, depending on your perspective or attitude going in. Wrath of the Righteous is challenging even on the default difficulty, and you will need to familiarize yourself with the mechanics to successfully complete it. Of course, it helps if you're already familiar with tabletop Pathfinder, which is mechanically also quite similar to various editions of D&D, so you do have an advantage if you are a CRPG veteran, considering how many of them are D&D-based.
The game has a habit of regularly throwing entirely new quests, characters, areas, and entire game modes at you, which can contribute to the player feeling overwhelmed, especially at the beginning. For example, you will be introduced to Crusade Mode fairly quickly, which is a sort of Heroes of Might and Magic-lite that you have to run parallel to your normal campaign. I personally did not mind this so much, but many players report that they dislike having to juggle the two game modes at once, which I understand. Fortunately, there is an option to have the computer run it.
All that said, if you do put in the time and effort to really get invested in Wrath of the Righteous, it rewards you many times over. The customization options are incredibly varied and versatile, once again almost to the point of feeling overwhelming at times. You will get that unique sense of power and satisfaction that can only be had from CRPGs, as you effortlessly crush what is supposed to be a tough encounter, thanks to your meticulously planned builds and tactics. All the way up until the end, I would regularly mouse over entries in the combat log, simply because I enjoyed seeing how even most high-AC enemies got ground into dust by my buffed, overpowered characters that I had spent so much time building up. This game is a power fantasy in the best possible way.
This power fantasy aspect extends to the narrative as well. As I understand it, the story is based on an existing Pathfinder tabletop module, which I've never played, so it's hard for me to gauge how much of it is specifically the result of Owlcat's writing. I will say that it is appropriately bombastic, and you will probably see most of the major story beats coming before they happen, at least if you are on the Angel path, which I suspect most first-time players will choose. However, this does not detract from the experience, as these literally epic events are usually handled quite well, and generally put a big grin on my face. The main story going so hard is also counterbalanced by the character interactions and side quests, where there is much more room for nuance and mundane concerns. No matter the alignment of your character, you will regularly be forced to make difficult, morally grey decisions.
Would I recommend Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous? More than almost any other title, this will depend on your own attitude and prior experience (with CRPGs in this case). This is not the sort of game you should be buying on a whim, just because it's on sale. Do your research. To get something out of WOTR, you have to be willing to put in the time and effort, and even then you will inevitably be frustrated at times. For me personally, however, the investment was well worth it, and I consider it to be one of the best games I've played in recent years.
Steam User 111
As someone in my mid-30s with three decades of video game experience, I write these overviews with a focus on how games fit into an adult life full of responsibilities. The criteria are deliberately subjective - check out my other reviews to see what resonates with you. These ratings are practical descriptions, not meant to be converted into numbers.
━━Resonance Score━━
⬜ Left a lasting mark
☑️ Will definitely revisit
⬜ One and done
⬜ Didn't finish
⬜ Wouldn't purchase again
━━Breakdown━━
Initial Feel
⬜ Instantly hooked
☑️ Grew on me
⬜ Took time to appreciate
⬜ Never quite clicked
Mechanical Flow
⬜ Perfectly polished
☑️ Satisfyingly smooth
⬜ Takes getting used to
⬜ Never feels quite right
⬜ Actively frustrating
Schedule Flexibility
⬜ Perfect for micro-sessions
⬜ Easy to pause and resume
⬜ Needs dedicated time blocks
☑️ Requires long uninterrupted sessions
Hook Level
☑️ "Where did my evening go?"
⬜ Regularly loses track of time
⬜ Balanced engagement
⬜ Natural stopping points
⬜ Easy to walk away
Mental Engagement Required
⬜ Podcast Game
⬜ Split Focus Friendly
⬜ Active Focus
☑️ Full Concentration needed
Learning Curve
⬜ Intuitive flow
⬜ Rewarding challenge
☑️ Steep but fair
⬜ Frustratingly complex
Break-Friendly Design
⬜ Easy to remember mechanics
☑️ Needs refresher time
⬜ Steep re-learning curve
⬜ Like starting from scratch
Aesthetic Impact
⬜ Sensory Masterpiece
☑️ Artistically Cohesive
⬜ Distinctively Styled
⬜ Mismatched Elements
⬜ Notably Lacking
Steam User 79
Wow. Just... wow. This game is definitely on par with BG3. It has way more options and content but loses out on multiplayer, which it clearly does not need.
I kinda understand why people wont enjoy it as much. The wall of texts.. lol. Most gamers today cannot slow down to smell the roses. It feels like I just read through a series of amazing books.. The Hobbit + LOTR + The Magician + Krondor + every D&D adventure..
198 hours for a first playthrough (with some dlc content). Really enjoyed the over map and my god the HOMM3 kinda battles.. such a nice side dish to cleanse the palate. Took wayyyyy too many hours for all the puzzles but it was all worth it. The ending felt much better than BG3's endings, maybe because I was more invested in everything.. or maybe it felt more real because there were more choices/outcomes? Hard to say.
Definitely a 9.5/10 game if you have the patience.
DO NOT purchase if you have never spent time reading books/novels before. Its nearly a torture x_x
Steam User 81
Got surprise gifted this game by a friend - I'd never heard of it before her, and sixty hours later and less than halfway into the game, I'm feeling a little indignant about that fact. This game deserves way more popular acclaim than it has.
I understand what's holding it back. I've played the hell out of Baldur's Gate 3, and I'm familiar with 3.5 from some tabletop back in college. This was not enough to figure out how to play Wrath of the Righteous. This game really, really fights you, and I can't recommend it before I get that out of the way. Even if you don't use guides - which you'll have to, if you're playing a higher difficulty - you'll be googling things left and right. It took me an hour to figure out how to use turn-based mode, 10 hours before I figured out how to get my party to follow me when I moved, and 40 hours before I realized I had to manually fill spell slots and that all of my mages only had access to their starting spells even though they'd unlocked level 5 spells. There are tutorials and recommendations, but they don't cover nearly enough, and once you hit Act 2 you're given an entirely new game mode without any preparation.
So. If you're not comfortable with tabletop, do not approach this. This is a game by nerds for nerds and you've gotta work to figure out how to play it.
But when you do? It is so, so worth it. The story is captivating, its scope is truly impressive, the mechanical freedom you have to build your party is insane, the characters are absolutely delightful, and the game has been hammering me with both crowning moments of awesome and unexpected betrayals from me, my party, and a cast of recurring characters. I just completed the Act 2 climax in a city siege so in-depth that it took me five hours to complete and I leveled up twice from the battles alone. My strategy with my party changed not only the outcome but the battlefield itself, and the allies I'd gathered aided me as I fought through the streets. I discovered traitors and unexpected allies. The groups of enemies I had to hack through began to run from me in terror as the tides turned. At the cusp of my triumph, my character was given the choice to become something greater than mortal - an angel, a demon, a faerie, a lich, a trickster, or a time-travelling extraplanar paragon of law, all of which change how not just the story unfolds but how the game itself is played.
One of my party members bailed on me for that city siege and I just found him lost in the wilderness swindling some cultists. Another claims to be a pristine, reserved noblewoman, except she's got a red-flag alignment hiding amulet and screams the most unhinged voice acting I have ever heard in battle. A third (and my favorite so far) invited me to a party at his Tragic Backstory Murder Mansion and the entire quest was about annoying, baiting, or daring him around the party so I could snoop on his secrets. The paladin is an ex-thief and the witch is the sweetest girl alive. I have collected so many different flavors of evil bastard in my core party but I Can Fix Them, I swear. An unexplained severed head appears in my inventory every morning and I put it into storage before I go for breakfast.
That's the kind of game Wrath of the Righteous is, once you take on the learning curve to play it. And I've still got most of the map left to cover. I can't wait for what else it has in store!