I've been playing computer role playing games for over 30 years. In all that time I have never felt compelled to leave a negative review for a game. Kingmaker is a tremendous lost opportunity.
The Good:
- Character creation and leveling follow the pathfinder ruleset closely.
- Combat mechanics are satisfying (despite being real time with pause, instead of turn-based).
- Custom party formation is a welcome quality of life feature.
- High fidelity graphics and visual effects.
The Bad:
- Encounter design is terrible.
- Kingdom management is a tedious and joyless experience. The option to play with it disabled doesn't work. There are many cases where you can lose the game by "misplaying" this mechanic, without explanation.
- Maps are reused 4-5 times in places.
- Very slow party travel across maps, with no ability to change walk speed.
- Choices have consequences, which would be great if you were given a clue what they were.
- Alignment based dialogue is poorly thought out and forces the player to 'roleplay' according to Owlcat's definition of alignment, which is often wrong.
- Enforced encumberance forces you to leave valuable loot behind.
- +5 weapons, worth thousands of GP, can be found in barrels and crates in towns during the end game.
- Annoying toy chow dogs barking, and NPCs coughing and grumbling at every other rest location. Are these quaint and relaxing sounds in Russia?
- Heavy, expensive, and limited 'camping provisions' are required to rest in dungeons.
- No ability to craft + poor itemization and very limited vendor selection.
- Random encounters offer almost no XP, and a bunch of loot you can't carry.
- Failure to resolve quests before deadlines results in losing the game.
- Tedious unsatisfying puzzles.
- Custom quests are poorly described, requiring unintuitive actions from the player (like using torches to kill swarms).
- If your character isn't charisma (CHA) focused you'll miss out on an entire level of party XP because you can't make the throne room event skill checks.
- Unbearable load times. Frequent required trips back to your throne room to solve kingdom management issues makes this especially painful.
- XP is doled out at certain times and locations only, like a bad CYOA novel. You cannot farm meaningful amounts of XP to level your party using random encounters.
- The game ends abruptly before you can maximize your character's level.
- Inumerable bugs, many of which are game breaking.
I lost two long games to game breaking and quest ending bugs.
I considered not leaving this review in the hopes that more people would buy this game, complain, and perhaps as a result Owlcat would fix their mess. Instead they ignored the obvious deep flaws with their game and put out a DLC.
