Recent reviews by Ghostly

It's a good game, I hope early access just keeps making it better.

Still great

Fun, pretty unique. I've only played the campaign. Sort of intrusive DLC, options and gameplay not explained well through tooltips. Very much assumes you have some knowledge of how warhammer games work, or even Warhammer Fantasy.

It's a great sci fi grand strategy game

This is a great game.

The developer continues to add new things to it and there are a huge amount of mods available, as well.

This is a great game for anyone who likes D&D.

I've played through several D&D titles myself, and I was a kickstarter for this game. After release there were a lot of bugs and the difficulty settings were frustrating so I put off fully exploring it for a long time, however once you get into the game it really does suck you in. I'm really just impressed that a game this ambitious managed to succeed well in the end, putting in a huge chunk of the pathfinder stuff was no small task but there are also other features like huge dialog trees and kingdom management stuff. Sure, there's still a lot of unimplemented Pathfinder classes/ spells/ etc, but it will probably always be so because Pathfinder has had years to release new content - and it's a lot easier to write a rules supplement than it is to implement more classes and monsters into a game).

Pros:
The visual effects are great, the sound ranges from good to amazing, the story writing and voice-overs are good. Some of the writing is a little cringey (mostly the little lines people say to each other when resting), but overall I thought it was good. The game gives you a huge amount of freedom and options to build characters, and it makes skills actually useful to the narrative. Kingmaker really manages to make it feel like your choices matter ruling your kingdom through what must be a dizzying maze of dialog branches. It is also a game that manages to make you feel very powerful - you can literally decide the fate of a vast amount of characters inside the game (it feels as though you can with nearly everyone you meet in the story, which is very impressive). The game also doesn't force you to kill to complete every quest and many can be solved through dialog - which is a welcome change from games like MMOs.

Cons:
At the time of writing this review there are still noticable bugs (such as with Ranger animal companions), but the team has been working on bugs over time and I think they'll get sorted out. There are occasionally pacing issues and things that are confusing, such as which quests actually will fail after neglecting them for a certain amount of time. The difficulty settings near the top end are ridiculous, and I consider myself someone who knows a lot about D&D because I've been a dungeon master in tabletop in various editions for 15+ years (this one is rather easy to resolve though, it just stinks you have to swallow your pride a little and realize that if you want to play with whatever party and characters you want, you must choose a difficulty setting like 'normal'). There is a staggering amount of lore in the game which is dumped on you from out of nowhere quite often when someone from a faction you've never heard of comes to you for help, which can be distracting.