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Pathfinder: Kingmaker


I wanted to finish it before writing a review, but I doubt I will. I'll explain the reason a little later.
In short.
We start playing as a nobody who won a tender for a barony in some backwater. I decided to immediately start experimenting, creating a human inquisitor with a wolf as a companion. And with a large hat. I must say, I didn't regret the choice: the character isn't top-tier as a pure combatant, but he's very versatile; you can customize his spell slots to compensate for any shortcomings of the party. And an extra wolf isn't a bad thing, although towards the end of the game, the beast seemed a bit weak. Not to mention that I had good non-combat rolls for him, charisma, intelligence, everything – how can a ruler do without it?
So, we're given a little bit of time to run around freely, kill some deer bandits, and then we suddenly become strategists, thinking about what to do with our barony, mainly solving a bunch of problems. And I really enjoyed this part of the game; it's not too complicated compared to real strategy games, but it sets a good direction – some of the problems with your lands will be solved automatically, but you'll have to deal with others personally. And your advisors will try to do something automatically, but they'll fail due to dice rolls. And there just won't be enough time for some things.
The companions have personal quests. I can't say that there were any real revelations or pearls in the style of forum expeditions, but some of them are quite good. Perhaps the Amiri storyline is well done (but mostly because it's woven into the main plot), the inseparable couple Regongar-Octavia's quests were also good in their own way because you could see some progress in these characters, some kind of reevaluation and so on. Valerie's quests can be called instructive in their own way, it's really fun with Jubilost (unlike most of the other humor), with Tristian they overdid it, but who knows, maybe fans of this world's lore will appreciate the mythology that is present in him.
In general, everything is good; the strategy is interspersed with running around on the real-time map with your squad, running around with the squad is interspersed with strategy; I found this scheme to be balanced, just like our Expeditions are a balanced series of shopping trips and all sorts of horrors in palaces, mansions, deserts, and military campaigns.
But there's one "but" – these are the super-long dungeons with overnight stays. And this is the reason for my dropout, because I really couldn't handle the last such dungeon (in Pitax). When you have a continuous series of battles, in each of which you have to give it your all and spend almost all of your spell slots, it's unpleasant and tedious. One battle – you go and set up camp and sleep, great... But if you don't sleep, be prepared for either Lyndsey to go to the capital to be resurrected, lamenting how miserable she is, or the wolf will end up under a permanent debuff that causes berserk, or... Oh, I'm not even going to say, because I didn't even manage to get through a third of the dungeon, and both of those things happened.
And that's exhausting. If you play cautiously, you spend a lot of time and effort; if you play recklessly, you get your ass kicked and can't even pass. This doesn't happen on regular locations.
Fairly, in the DLC "Beneath the Stolen Lands," the authors managed to create an even larger dungeon with a huge number of levels, but it doesn't feel as unpleasant. Perhaps thanks to the portals, with which, after completing each level, you can go out to the surface and do other things, but probably not only because of them.
I also can't help but note that I enjoyed running around on large combat maps that aren't dungeons. For example, on the "Old Platan" location, especially in its surface part.

In conclusion, I want to say that, despite the described drawback and the final dropout, I can't say anything particularly bad about the game. There were some minor annoyances, perhaps a few bugs or something that seemed not very logical to me (like the imbalance of weapons and the uselessness of many of its classes), but in the end, I spent a decent amount of time in the game (87 hours) and got a lot of enjoyment. More than from both Divinity:OS, strangely enough, although I can't compare it to anything else in the genre due to lack of experience. Well, and I dropped it at a much later stage of the game than the original sins (in which I played about 30 hours): basically, here the very end is already, and the plot is probably clear... Probably?
I can only describe the attitude towards the game on the Internet as underrated.
 

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