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Pathfinder: Kingmaker — Enhanced Plus Edition
For a fantasy RPG built around party adventures and shaping a kingdom, Pathfinder: Kingmaker brings both into one isometric campaign. At the current tracked low, it costs ≈ $0.15 at 
Kinguin; Steam players rate 77% of 28,226 reviews positively.
The single-player format suits a journey at your own pace, and full controller support offers another way to play. Exploration and combat share the stage with diplomacy and political choices. At $19.99 from Kinguin, alongside 77% positive reviews out of 28,226, the current price has useful player context.
KinguinPathfinder: Kingmaker Enhanced Plus Edition NA PC Steam CD Key
K4GPathfinder: Kingmaker Enhanced Plus Edition North America Steam CD Key
EnebaPathfinder: Kingmaker - Enhanced Plus Edition Steam Key NORTH AMERICA-98%from~ $0.34ALL-TIME LOWBuy now
GGselPathfinder Kingmaker Enhanced Plus Edition (Steam Ключ) СНГ-МИР (не все страны) + ПОДАРОКCredit/Debit Cardfrom~ RUB 525.99Buy nowAll-time low ~ $2.79across Steam & third-party storesat the recorded all-time low
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $0.462026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $17.99Kinguinvs. Historical Low+3811%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
01About Pathfinder: Kingmaker — Enhanced Plus Edition
Explore the Stolen Lands from an isometric perspective, build a party, and venture through a classic fantasy role-playing campaign. Alongside dungeons and exploration, diplomacy, politics, and founding a kingdom shape the journey; your choices and allies influence how that realm develops. Steam player reviews: 77% positive from 28,226 reviews. The Steam PC version supports single-player and full controller support. The interface is available in English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, and Simplified Chinese. English full audio and subtitles for supported languages are available.
Credits
WRITER
Chris Avellone
American video game designer
Composer
Inon Zur
Developer
Owlcat Games
Publisher
Knights Peak
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$0.462026-07-30 · KinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| English | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| French | Yes | Yes | — |
Show 3 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| German | Yes | Yes | — |
| Russian | Yes | Yes | — |
| Japanese | — | Yes | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-19
02Before you buy
Play and controls
The Steam PC version is single-player and has full controller support.
Language and audio
Interface languages include English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, and Simplified Chinese. English has full audio; supported languages include subtitles.
03Frequently asked questions
What do you do in the game?
Explore dungeons and ruins, make choices, and build a kingdom.
Can I play solo?
Yes. The Steam PC version is listed as single-player.
How do choices affect the kingdom?
Your decisions, allies, and leadership shape your kingdom and its capital.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
In A Nutshell 🔵 Pros + Exceptional variety of classes available, boosting replay-ability by a lot. + Very deep and complex combat mechanics. + The Pathfinder setting is one of the best Fantasy ones around. + Excellent voice acting in dialogues and narration. + Very well written and varied story, role-playing interactions. + Quality graphics for a CRPG. + Great variety of enemies, loot, weapons, equip, and spells. 🔴 Cons - Time limit on Main Quest and also on certain critical Events later on. Very annoying. - Fatigue / Resting mechanics, as of now, are annoying and make exploration less enjoyable. - Way too many random fights while traveling. - Problems with enemy balance in several fights, making them too much RNG dependent or frustrating. - Cannot create a custom party from the start, mainly for money reasons. This can lead to unbalanced composition. Pathfinder: Kingmaker (PK from now) is a classic RPG set in the universe of Pathfinder, one of the most famous and iconic ones of all time. The game starts out impressively well, boasting a huge amount of character classes to choose from, and suit all the play styles and roleplaying needs, each with its own skill trees and sub-classes even, assuring an incredible variety. The character building system is the classic, deep, old-school CRPG one using attributes and lots of statistics, and based on d20 rule-set, with a few modifications here and there. The impossibility to create a custom party from the start, typical of many old-school RPGs such as Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale to mention a few, is a bit disappointing, and also can lead to party composition problems later on, as depending on choices, different "mandatory" companions, with preset classes, will be added to your party, which can in turn become unbalanced in a negative manner. A custom party is doable, but only later. PK adds to the classic CRPG formula some management gameplay: first you will have to take care of the fatigue needs of your party, manage money well to afford camping supplies, potions and healers, and be efficient in your travel paths, while later, you will eventually be able to manage your very own little kingdom, with most of the aspects deriving from such responsibility. In part all this is new and welcome, but on the other hand, such mechanics are several times made in ways that make them more annoying than anything else. Pathfinder: Kingmaker is a deep and wide CRPG title, with some excellent points to it as you can read above, but also several issues regarding game design and balancing, which weigh pretty heavily on the overall experience, resulting ultimately in a far less enjoyable gameplay than it should. Liked this review, and want to see more of the same quality? Check out Tamaster's Review Archive to see all my Reviews in a single, convenient location. In-depth Feature Analysis 🎮 Gameplay The gameplay of PK is based mainly on Exploration, Combat, Role-playing and Management. Exploration is performed via a global map featuring pre-determined roads to follow, and many crossroads to decide directions. Even if the path is not free but "on rails", the game still features a good amount of locations and places to discover around the world. There is no fast travel, traveling takes a long time and your party can encounter enemies and random events while doing so, and also need rest pretty often. Fatigue builds up the more you travel, depending on constitution of each character, but sooner or later rest is needed or major penalties to attributes occur, making combat and checks a lot harder. Role-playing interactions, as in any CRPG, should be the crown jewel of the experience, and in fact they are in PK, which features very well-written dialogues, a vast array of options, some of which unique and tied to the player's specific class, alignment, or other factors, and deeply branching dialogue trees. On this side, this title is excellent and will be the joy of any role-player. Management part is about rationing resources wisely, using resting supplies sparingly, being efficient in traveling around, and later, managing resources and other aspects of your very own kingdom, including repelling invasions and hiring advisors. The fact invasions are also timed and your presence is needed to repel them in a certain time, will be rather annoying, as if you are in the middle of something, you'll have to go back. 📖 Story The storyline featured in PK is long and complex, as relations between noble houses and kingdoms come into play often, as do intrigues and struggles for power. Not only, but your alignment and relationship with companions can even change the outcome of many events, making the possibilities all the more interesting! Writing is great albeit some typos here and there, and companions / characters are interesting and have great personalities. 👊 Combat System Combat is real-time with dynamic pause, a classic for CRPGs. Since it uses a d20 rule-set as core, expect an uncompromising, deep and complex battle system worthy of the classics of old, where a lot of factors need to be considered, and where each fight is a tactical challenge on its own. The only problem with it is balance, as you will soon see. 💰 Content & Pricing As expected from any CRPG, the game is very long on its own, depending on how much you explore and quests you take, and difficulty aswell, the game can last even 80+ hours. For the proposed price of 40€, i'd say the game is worth buying for the amount of content offered alone. 🔗 Balance & Challenge There are serious issues here. Several encounters on the Challenging and above difficulties are incredibly punishing and unfair, making the player rely more on lucky strikes of RNG rather than strategy. This would be okay if happened seldom, but instead happens quite often. The mechanics about Fatigue, Camping and Resting are unnecessarily annoying and result in the exploration becoming a chore instead of interesting as it should be. These are by FAR the worst issues of the whole game. Technical Analysis 🎥 Graphics Very good for this genre, using Unity3D engine and achieving surprising results. effects, textures and models are of good quality, while portraits and art are superb. Excellent. 🔊 Sound Good soundtracks, excellent voice-acting, and average effects. Solid. 🔩 Performance & Stability Performance needs some optimization work at the moment, but with some setting tweaking most issues can be solved. Decent. [GTX1080, i7 4820K, 16GB RAM] 💻 Artificial Intelligence Enemy AI is pretty smart and will focus one character to quickly kill them sometimes, and use advanced tactics such as flanking and pincer maneuvers. Companion AI is not that smart sadly, and sometimes your peers will just do nothing, and have to be manually commanded most of the time. 🏠 Quality of Life No issues to report. 🐛 Bugs & Issues There are quite a few minor bugs around, but nothing major to report. Many people did report save-game corruption and crashes, but this never happened to me. Conclusion Kingmaker is a very good CRPG in many aspects, but those few downsides are quite critical because of how they impact the overall experience, and really hold it back from being a truly great title. This product was reviewed using a free key provided by the Developers.Show moreShow less
17.3 hours at review1,043 people found this helpful
Received for free
Not recommendedSteam player
**This is a 60 hr re-re-review with similar thoughts but far more collected. For those who do not like reading I still do not suggest the game to any but the hardcore. It has been noted that I have 60 hours in the game how bad can it be? But it has not been without a plethora of bugs and a personal disagreement in balance. I will preface that the numbers I have attained are from an adjusted standard difficulty with the damage turned up to 1-1 ratio, crits to 1-1 ratio, and enemies to standard. I aimed for a 1 for 1 recreation of pathfinder only to realize it is Pathfinder however only if my GM was a maniac. Rather than the previous wall of stat text this spreadhseet breaks down some of the combats in the first Act and I labeled the ones I consider overtuned with notes on why. Obvious spoilers inside: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UdOs8kl0NETPJ4e5a0I-UPOzPfso8Vw3E5LCIpvJuw4/edit?usp=sharing Additionally I have an Album here of some of the Act 2 mobs you can run into https://imgur.com/a/ng9KQwX ===[ ☣ Onto the review: ]=== As a long time Pathfinder GM and an avid CRPG fan I find myself at odds with the game.. The choice for live action rather than turn based hurts more than previous iterations like Neverwinter Nights, Baldurs Gate, and Icewinddale. Pathfinder has a bit of static number bloat made worse by crit hits. This is why we see 2h characters dominate the battlefield and the game tends to boil down to a lot of RNG reload gameplay. Due to live action some quality of life changes have severe consequences. Flanking no longer requires positional flanking merely having 2 people engaging it in melee qualifies every person capable of sneak attacking. Thus All combinations of Rogue, Vivisectionist, and Arcane Trickster are extremely popular. Almost every build dumps a few levels just to pick up those juicy d6s on every swing. This is exacerbated by the fact that the story companions are unoptimized to hell and some of the encounters you will face in the first act arent just min maxed but intended for parties well above the acts end level (CR6 encounters at lvl 2-3). An easy solution would be to hire your own custom party but that is very expensive early on (4000 gold) that scales with level (40,000 at lvl 8). Minor spoilers below My prime example would be a story character who is your standard 2h giant weapon barbarian who has only 16 str and 13 dex whose feats went to exotic weapon prof and HP meanwhile in Sycamore there is a bandit archer.. an archer with 20 str and 18 dex and a slew of NPCs with far better to hit numbers, damage and defenses due to not being gimped. ===[ ☣ Enemy Balance ]=== The issue also comes from the early game heavily pointing you to overly difficult fights for a group of 4 suboptimal lvl 2 characters. The recent patches did alleviate some of the overtuning but even as a GM I would not throw a non optimized party against a good few of the encounters in Act 1. Immediately upon setting down the road you are prodded to follow your rival which if done properly (by making the right skill checks) will put you in the same zone as some CR6+ encounters at lvl 2 with little to no warning signs to stay away from the encounters. Now a CRPG player would say "double back and level up" but this game has a constant reminder that you are in a limited time window for a main boss and the zone with the overtuned encounter is just a side plot. Even at the top end level of Act1 some of the encounters in the spreadsheet are rough. These fights are all beatable however I personally copped out rerolling my Sorceror to a 50+AC sword saint.The way in which I beat them is not careful planning, strategy, positioning or anything of the sort. I had to cheese the game make myself unhittable to anything but a 20 and pray the 30 minimum damage lvl 7 troll doesnt get lucky enough to 2 shot my tank. The rest of the "hipster difficulty brigade" sitting in the fire saying "everything is fine" are powergaming, abusing broken mechanics, and save scumming to victory thinking that is what true dificulty is. But this could not be further from the truth, ===[ ☼ GMs experience ]=== Many inexperienced GMs including my younger self made these mistakes but if Owlcat wants to fix them you don't just toss out +4s to everything 12+Bab 35-40 str and 30+ ac, double the HP, and the god forsaken blur/displacement monster template like its going out of style that just promotes your players missing a bunch and the enemies steamrolling. Instead of massive to hit values you have the monster spend an action sundering armor, or using another combat maneuver. Like the Troll back kicks the rogue flanking him, a wyvern wing buffeting people to the ground, an Enraged owlbear acting like an enraged owlbear using overrun through the party, etc. Have adds with spells that target touch AC. The monster can use Frightening Presence to temporarily disable some of the party members. The map can be changed with difficult terrain that the monster template is immune to. The enemy can call for reinforcements. Or you could just add another CR appropriate mob instead of making the one you have godmode. Immersion wise its also odd to see Owlbears with the stats of an Ancient Dragon if you want to toss something that hard in by all means throw in an actual Ancient Dragon with the rewards to match rather than taking a cr4 and making him a cr7 with little to no exp / item reward. This comes from a place of disappointment rather than frustration even though I mostly GM I am well aware of how to powergame and my current playthrough in the Womb of Lamashtu steamrolls 90% of the content until one of these OP mobs come up where I must actually use short term buffs and then steam roll it. I do not feel accomplished, I know the odds of being hit, and how much more damage my min maxed party does compared to a normal build. The difference is if I just stop powergaming my party gets melted unless I find a way to be invincible or permanently debilitate the enemy which is not fun at all. I could turn up the difficulty except I already know what that actually does which just lengthens the time my teammates miss waiting for 20s while the enemies do the same to my tank. ===[ § Bugs ]=== I have restarted and paced myself because I was aware and kept an eye on the fact that as of just recently the game was almost unbeatable due to bugs. Even just today they mentioned a hotpatch because the last patch made a story quest incompletable. The people that reached the end are suffering greatly due to not having completed quests that currently cannot be completed. I have suffered quest bugs, UI errors, lost items, Artisans peacing out, Bokken suffering a sudden fatal aneurism, and more. ===[ ۞ Kingdom management ]=== It is an amazing idea with many facets but very poor implementation. Many of the projects take inordinate amounts of time during which a severe problem may arise that your advisor is just too darned busy to take care of. People have been ignoring anything that says opportunity and waiting for problems. The "support your xxx advisor" locks you into a 14 day+ time skip where everything can go to hell in a handbasket rather than just locking down that 1 advisor. In my opinion Each advisor should have 3 slots: An Opportunity, A Problem, and a Project as humanoids are capable of multitasking. When it comes time to upgrade an advisor by all means lock out all 3 because its an important investment but leave the main character out of the lock. ===[ TL;DR: ]=== I cannot recommend this game until some serious patches go in. That being said the story, characters, writing, and voice actors are top notch if you want to actually enjoy yourself drop down the difficulty and enjoy some good writing and still relatively hard content due to the above issues.Show moreShow less
96.4 hours at review962 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Currently nine out of ten negative reviews are something like this: "This game is bad, I can't beat the first side quest with spider swarms because you have to use fire/acid/magic to kill them! You have to be a sorcerer to win this game!" In other words most people claim that in the first few hours you already get cheesed by the developer. After about 7 hours into the story I've deduced these people can't be further away from the truth. Long story short, yes... there are a few enemies that have to be killed with specific types of damage. In normal circumstances fire or magic/enchanted weapons will do the trick. However, most of these enemies have no resistance, which means you can just damage them normally and let someone with fire, acid or magical enchantment do the final hit. "But what if I don't have that in my party?" One, you start out with two free torches. If you have played other RPG games and you know what you are doing, this will suffice. Two, you can start out with a friggin' OP barbarian build on a female companion (Amiri) that, considering you are level 1, has been given an overpowered +1 enchanted 2H sword... with extra damage. You can also have a few other powerful companions to obtain in the prologue. Older DnD games never gave you free +1 weapons at the start, you know. Three, you obtain a level up before you encounter these types of enemies so this gives you plenty of room to build your companions the way you see fit... and they aren't locked into classes like some NPCs were in the older Neverwinter Nights games so right at the start you can customise your party to your liking--and needs! Four, I had already obtained enough loot for money to buy a +1 Mace... if I wanted to. But I didn't need to and none of my characters plan to use maces, so... why would I. If you don't know DnD mechanics don't blame that on this developer. This game is extremely accurate AND enjoyable in how they have implemented it. There's probably lots of small gripes I can mention that I have with this game, but none of them kill the joy I have while playing this. I am actually quite outraged that SINCE MANY YEARS they made a proper DnD PC Game again... and then all these little kids who don't know how DnD mechanics work swarm it with negative reviews? Do not believe a SINGLE word of what those people are writing. This is in fact the DnD game you have been waiting for. These 7 hours into the game I have only encountered two problems: level up pages not being loaded or skipped, which is fixed by just *shocker* going a page back and then forward. The second bug was that for some reason if you alt+tab out of the game my keyboard stops working in the game. Fixed by restarting the game and not a huge deal. I'll transform this into a proper review as I put more hours into the game... for now I just want to rant at the kids downvoting this game because they don't know how to play. Game works fine, as intended.Show moreShow less
49.9 hours at review901 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Devs ignored all constructive criticism during Beta. Encounters are horrifically overtuned for something so close to actual Pathfinder Tabletop gameplay. Enemies multiple levels ahead of you on story required fights in numbers. While XP and Gold/Treasure value is reduced by 75% (Or more since it doesnt take into account ENCOUNTERS just individual NPCs). If you actually recieved the proper amount of XP for what you have to go through you'd be nearly level NINE at the end of the first Act (There are 6 and you should be level 4 at the end of the first). Hell the last 2 encounters for the "Sycamore Tree" "Dungeon" are so extreme you could have gotten an entire level off of them alone at the level you SHOULD be. You're also bombarded by groups of fully optimized enemies capable of disabling half your team with spells before you can do anything since Initiative got thrown right out the window. And in one situation just stand there spamming channel energy to Harm Living which their horde or meat shields ignore thanks to perfectly chosen feats. Everything BUT the balance of this game is fantastic (Aside from the hefty amount of bugs) I just can't recommend it due to the horrific balancing. Take it from someone who has played tabletop RPGS for near 30 years and has played kingmaker twice and DM'd it 3 times. If i had thrown these encounters at my players they would have quit and refused to ever play with me again. That's not fun. Having to reload a fight 12+ times while exploiting buggy A.I. in order to get a fair and appropriate challenge isnt fun. Having to reload a fight 12+ because the "boss" has 1d4+14 damage against my frontliners and downs them in 3 or less hits isnt fun. Having to deal with companions with stats that are so poorly assigned that they have a 20% higher miss chance and i cant get custom ones made because they cost 4500 gold which is near half of what i've found in the whole chapter ISNT FUN. If they actually change the horrific balancing i'll swap my recommendation and wrath a 5 paragraph review praising it. Oh, I was also a $110 tier Backer.Show moreShow less
43.2 hours at review905 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Before I get into criticising this game I would like to preface this by pointing out that a substantial amount of negative reviews here are either hyperbolic or outright lies. If you read the following criticisms in a review I can asure you they are at best hyperbolic, or outright lies at worst: "Game is buggy mess, crashes all the time, etc." No, this was only true at release because the publisher forced Owlcat to rush the game out early. It has been about 7 month and the developers have worked tirelessly not only to suqash the bugs but to make lot of improvements. Anyone claiming this is nothing but a liar. "Load times are terrible" Again untrue, as mentioned before Owlcat was forced to release it months too early but they have improved load times and amount of load screens substantially. If you have an SSD you will have very fast load times. "Game is unbalanced" All D&D games are unbalanced. This is moresoe a problem of the character system than an actual problem with the game. D&D is a very unbalanced character system especially since it was never designed to be optimized for computers but for a human Dungeon Master. "The walk speed is slow" A subjective nitpick at best. I never had a problem with the walk speed though I know some who would like it to be faster. That being said, with upcoming Enhanced Edition, which should see release today, they will have an option for the player to speed it up. "There are alignment restrictions" You are playing a role playing game. While certain dialogue options could be argued to be rather arbitrary the restrictions often do make sense. What is more they rarely impact the story in a major way and are mostly for actual roleplaying. If you play a benevolent neutral good ruler it would make very little sense if you would order the slaughter of innocents just because you can. That is what it is mostly about. You still have a decent amount of choice, you just cannot act completely opposed to your chosen alignment all the damn time for the luls. "The game is too difficult and the numbers are bloated" This is only true for the highest two difficulties. Challenging is very close to the tabletop game but the game allows you to basically completely customize difficulty. The only penalty is not getting a handful of achievments linked to Hard and Unfair difficulty. With this out of the way I would like to begin with my own review. In a nuthell, Pathfinder:Kingmaker is an old school RPG somewhat similar to the classic Infinity Engine games like the Baldur's Gate series, Icewind Dale series or Planescape Torment. That being said it is very different from those games. To start with the character creation is the best I have ever seen, superior to those games mentioned or any other D&D game including Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2. Not only do you have classes but each class offers usually 3 archetypes, something unique to the Pathfinder system, which differentiates the base classes even further. There is a humongous amount of choices and optimizations available which is unmatched by basically any other RPG. The gameplay itself is a classic RTwP, the action goes in real time but you can pause whenever you like. There are a lot of strategic options open how to handle a situation especially at higher levels. As so often you can have up to 6 party members though more companions are available. You can chose your members during certain map transitions and on the travel map, though changing companions on the map takes a few days usually. Apart from the usual adventuring and dungeon crawling there is a unique second half of the game which comes into play after the first act, the kingdom management. You will start out with a small patch of land and an equally small capitol, relatively speaking, and your goal is to turn it from a backwater barony to a flourishing kingdom. Personally I like that you can be a ruler and have to make some tough choices at times. Once you get things going you will gain access to new merchants and certain artisans will offer you at times very strong items though if you are not handling them properly they might leave your kingdom never to be seen again. If you really do not like managing a kingdom and want to solely concentrate on adventuring, there is an auto-management option where you are hardly ever required to do anything. You will miss out on some of the rewards doing so though. Companions are overall well written. Some people might be put off by certain characters initial behaviour but if you give them a chance and play through their personal story arc you will notice that there is usually more than what is at the surface. Every character has a personal story arc which usually needs a few chapters to be finished. Do not listen to people telling you that the companions "suck" in terms of combat performance or other such nonsense. Most of them are reasonably well optimized and you can finish the game with then even on Unfair. Most of them were designed with RPG background in mind and some are even taken over from the table top game, Amiri being the prime example. The story is decent and engaging in my opinion, through writing is a bit uneven at times. It has some nice twists and turns and a solid amount of tough choices. I will not really say much more since I would have to get into spoilers. Now that I have mentioned some of its upsides I would like to show the weaknesses of the game. -First and foremost there is a lot of "trash" combat. This is typical for most cRPGs but I find it a bit more egregious here. I prefer quality over quantity overall. It does not help that on occasion the random encounters happen in terrain which is not fitting with the terrain shown on the travel map and the tiny random encounter maps are quite repetitive. -Kingdom management is not well balanced, buildings providing not nearly as many benefits as they should in comparison to successfully managing events. This will hopefully now be fixed with the upcoming Enhanced Edition which should be released today. -The last chapter of the game is basically a long combat slog and as so often the weaker part of the game, a stark contrast to the great early chapters. - Sneak attack and flanking is too easy in this game, making it very alluring to get into almost any character build, including many caster builds. -Some classes/archetypes are really too strong. Vivisectionist is almost universally taken for almost any build by power gamers due to certain class features available already at levels 1 and 2. Personally I ignore it completely but I understand the reason and the power it offers. -Lastly my biggest gripe are the difficulties. I find anything beyond Challenging tedious and boring since all they did was blowing up certain monster stats, including double damage. Not only does this lead to extreme powergaming behaviour were people make completely nonsensical character combinations, it restricts the amount of viable builds quite a lot. Summa summarum, this is imho one of the best RPGs that came out in the past decade, despite its terrible start. If you like old school RTwP games like Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights or Icewind Dale you should give this one a chance.Show moreShow less
259.3 hours at review458 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Kingmaker has the potential to be one of the greatest CRPGs ever made. The scope is incredible, the ambition behind the game is commendable, and it's clearly aiming to be a true spiritual successor to the Baldur's Gate series. Unfortunately, the game was released several months too early. Its myriad issues have been documented in angry postings across the internet; suffice to say that the game simply cannot be played above the lowest difficulty level without the use of a guide and regularly save-scumming. There are many, many ways for players to inadvertently fail quests (often before they've even begun) or find themselves in unwinnable situations which they couldn't possibly have prepared for in advance without cheating. The "Kingdom Management" mode is very obviously still in an early beta state. Kingmaker is a lesson in why games need thorough playtesting, particularly from people other than the devs or hardcore backers.Show moreShow less
131.1 hours at review532 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
“You move from being merely a piece on the board to being one of the players.” Pathfinder: Kingmaker (PFK) represents a real-time with pause (RTWP) role-playing game (RPG), developed by the company Owlcat Games and published by the company Deep Silver. It is based on the Paizo Publishing’s Pathfinder franchise. Pros & cons: ++ Exploration & immersion. Vast and mature fantasy world with great love for detail creating an atmosphere of an old school Dungeon & Dragons (D&D) adventure. Choice of freedom how you deal with confrontations. Dialogues and events can be solved by an attribute or skill check. Excellent background music enriches the atmosphere. ++ Tactical depth. Multi-layered class and skill system allows for differentiated team setups and character customization. Strategic and political reasoning is tested on the world map and your interactions with the neighbouring nations. All these factors increase the replay value. + Story telling & characters. Well written dialogues and narrative surrounded by a deep and complex mythology. Charismatic side characters have their own moral standards and will comment on your decisions. Solid voice acting. Alignment system is influenced by your choices. + Difficulty. Implementation of a dynamic difficulty system provides RPG newcomers, veterans and masochists with a satisfying challenge. At its peak, it requires substantial skills at classical RPGs, experience in the D&D set of rules, and sometimes - a sheer amount of luck with dice rolls. o While the main questline and some of the dialogues with the party characters offer professional voice-over, all side quests and other events remain silent. - Diamond in the rough. The game would have needed more time in the oven. Several hotfixes since the release. Missing pictures for non-player characters. Some items and skills do not work as described, e.g. the Necklace of Double Crosses. Summary: PFK represents a high quality RPG experience with emphasis on exploration, and I cherish the immersion in its sophisticated fantasy world. It has rekindled my passion for this genre I thought lost since the Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale series of games. Recommended for curious adventurers and the masochistic core of RPG community. Achievements: Estimated time for 100 % completion: +400 hours Singleplayer achievements: 74 Multiplayer achievements: noneShow moreShow less
245.5 hours at review432 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I wanted to love this game. As I was going through it I was saying to myself: Finally! An isometric crpg that could scratch my Baldur's Gate itch. It was complete with well thought story, Kingdom management (would make Nahlia's Keep look like a barn) and even well thought out politics. The characters were usually interesting, many of the lines were well voiced, and graphically it was a marvel. So... why the red arrow? Because there's a time limit. Now I recall why I avoided the game. The only way to get an *optimum* playthrough is to know where everything is and when to go there. You should not do things on your terms, but rather do them only on the game's terms. This system was put in place to prevent you from going around doing too much Empire grinding but honestly it only restricts how you play the game. Tons of games allow you to grind your character out of proportion yet here you have to do math to figure out how to best spend your time. It's frustrating because this can lead you into dead ends that make the game completely unfun. It's roughly the equivalent to how you could change the difficulty settings to make 99% of the game absolutely trivial, yet for whatever reason the amount of time you spend traveling and the deadlines are strict to an extreme. And that is what I don't like about this. It literally gives you a time limit, then when you finish that time limit it gives you another and another. I'm racing the clock, I'm not having fun. If any of you guys can show me where to find time restriction removal so I can have fun and explore the world on my own terms that would probably really help, I couldn't find any even searching through cheat engine and others. EDIT: So I've gotten around to installing bag of tricks and let me tell you guys? It's insane. It adds so much and does everything I'd want it to do and more. Because of this mod I managed to get around through the whole game. And I will say the game has its flaws. First, trying to play as a chaotic evil character has a lot of chaotic stupid choices. The scheming evil character who pretends to be good is not an option, you must play your alignment as much as you can regardless of how dumb it is. And it would be ok, if you didn't give me just "attack this individual" while good options make alliances. Evil can make alliances, but it's normally through coercion, deceit, etc. I'd probably enjoy it more if it did what baldur's gate did. Not include alignment shifts, and allow players bonus options based on alignment. And they have bonus options in this game too I suppose, I just wish I could role play my schemer without telling my kingdom I'm going to enslave everyone during the coronation. Second, the backtracking is awful. The dungeon between time is by far one of the flat out most insane dungeons ever created. It's big but it lasts so utterly long because you have to backtrack constantly and I spent hours looking around for the third key, I ended up breaking down and just using a youtube video for it. Whoever made that dungeon is banned from dungeon making. Third, the story, while it is restrictive in how events unfold, the directions the story can be curved feels pretty nice. I can actually choose what to do and where to go. And it feels awesome. It felt pretty cool to "redeem" armag with the chaotic option and become sworn brothers, so it's a shame that the tribe rebelled against him. Few rpgs nowadays make the endgame the goal of immortality, and this was exactly what I wanted from it. Anyway, it's a cool game, and it does have an issue here and there. (loadscreens especially!) I would not recommend without bag of tricks mod, consider it recomend with.Show moreShow less
22.7 hours at review514 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
This game is a masterpiece. I feel bad for the developers that it has received so many negative reviews here on steam. + Excellent story and writing. + Fantastic world building - The people, places and history of the world are very well realized. + Gorgeous graphics, artwork and animations. Every place you visit or character you meet feels handcrafted and distinct. + Deep stategic combat and character customization. + Great loot, crafting and consumables systems. A lot of rpg games get this badly wrong - it's done brilliantly here. + Huge amount of content to be explored and replayability value. (only just finished chapter 2 after 4 days of non stop play). Summary - I have not had this much joy playing an rpg for a long time, divinity 1&2 were great, poe games never really clicked for me - this game is far better than both of them. The depth and complexity of the game require a bit more of the gamer than the average rpg, but if you have patience you will be rewarded with an amazing experience.Show moreShow less
113.1 hours at review410 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
NOTE (04/01/23): Just to update, all previous issues have long since been addressed and fixed, This game is totally recommendable now. This is a tough one for me as I am a huge Pathfinder fan and a backer of this game from day one but I have to be honest in my review and as things stand currently I would NOT recommend this game it needs substantially more passes by QA and patching before it is anywhere near what it should be to be an enjoyable experience. So lets start with the good. Graphically it is beautiful and the mustic is first rate. The character creator is fairly expansive and there are MANY options. The story itself is appealing and based on Pazios most successful adventure path series to date, although to be more accurate it is based on all parts of said adventure path to some degree...being a level 1-20 experience. Combat is very familiar to CRPG fans in being largely real time with pauses and if you have played games like Divinity Original sin then combat will be nothing new to you. The are the game is set in is expansive and has MANY locations to discover and explore. The Kingdom system is frankly more interesting than the Pen and Paer games version of it, which was a pleasant treat and adds a whole new game within a game to things. And now for the bad.. Firstly a minor thing Character Portraits, there are very few, admitedly art costs are expensive but you do not even have 2 or 3 choices per gender per race and worse yet you see the portraits turn up used for NPC's too and when you meet an NPC's whose picture does not show up..that was the one that used your portrait. Then on to bigger issues Bugs, game breaking issues and the like, even now two patches in the game is rife with bugs many of which can totally break your game progress. Another bug which is still persisting two patches in is the inability to have more than one character, if you have one game and then make another eventually it will just vanish and all its saves will disappear..this can leads to many hours of play just disappearing without rhyme or reason. I originally for example made three characters (so three games) I logged in the next day the last made and its saves had vanished. I continued playing my first character and a few days later the remaining other characters saves had vanished too. At this point I have no idea if my game will be there when i log in at all. Another big one is balance. This game is an absolute mess when it comes to balance. The pen and paper parts it is based on for example was a 1st to 3rd, 4th - 6th, etc.. upto 18th across all six chapters (adventures), breaking up progression and providing credible balanced threats for each level range, however this for the CRPG has been spread to a 1st through to 20th experience and none of the areas or encounters scale for the players groups level they are all fixed. So you can right out of the gate literally stumble onto areas and encounters you LITERALLY cannot win. Period. Coming back to things later on is all well and good but this falls afoul of another issue with the game the story uses deadlines. You literally have X amount of days to do something before something happens. If you are not levelled up enough to handle said thing then you are screwed. And so you waste lots of time going back and forth looking for encounters you actually CAN beat at your level (and do not necessarily find) all of which takes time. And this does not just happen once but multiple times as each time you clear the first deadline there is another new threat pending and another new deadline.. this leaves you constantly needing to level and hoping you have enough time and luck to find things you can actually do at your current level to do it. Deadlines in themselves are horrendous and unfun but put together with the non scaling content s imbalance and what you have is an utter mess. I am a little baffled as to exactly what the QA department were doing if anything as the bugs and imbalance both are hard to miss even an hour in let alone longer. Someone seriosuly dropped the ball.. and this kills me as I wanted this to be awesome. The long and short being if you are a Pathfinder fan like me then there will be some enjoyment to be had but your probabaly better off waiting for this to get some more patch and balancing love first before buying. If your not and just want a CRPG to play.. in all honesty there are far better, less frustrating ones to be found that won't cost as much in cash or disappointments.Show moreShow less
29 hours at review490 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.