David Gaynor

Great underpinnings let down by horriffically poorly written code and text, bizarre design decisions and awful UI. This is the kind of game I should love, but I find myself barely tolerating. They all but force you to play a cast of insipid characters with painfully one dimensional personaities tied to the terrible D&D alignment system. You are all but forced to assign these poorly optimised slobs to help run your kingdom too. The difficulty is stupidly harsh for how bad the NPCs you are given are, meaning you more or less have to min max to play the game on anything harder than easy. Stupid given that it's run off a very complicated D&D 3.5e clone called Pathfinder which is never explained in the game and basically relies on you having system knowledge and spend time googling to find out what spells exist, etc to plan your build. The UI for the kingdom management is terrible, never showing relevant info, making you dig around to do anything and pointelessly locking you out from making changes on some tasks. The UI for combat is glitchy and painful to use, the turn based mode ocaaisionally just not letting you use a character's turn for no reason. The dice roll DCs often lie, with stuff like 17 AC needing a 16 to hit with a +10 or the floating text laughably floating up saying something like "20 vs 9" and that somehow failing a save, or the inverse. The randomiser has some backend fudging going on where you will commonly see your characters rolling 1s and critically missing and enemies commonly rolling 5/5 16+s to hit you. Text has poor grammar, misspellings, and wordy paragraphs of stodge to waste your time. You are frequently railroaded into decisions, or made to make decisions that make no sense because the developers don't even understand the alignment system they insisted on using. Skill DCs are set far too high, being commonly failable even with min maxed characters, leaving no room for rp. Much of the issues are met with the refrain "Just cheat to fix that" from the community, which is mind boggling. Overall, this is a terrible effort at a crpg, but is at least pretty, with some nice music and a reasonable adaptation of the Pathfinder system for a video game. It's just a shame it's so badly put together. I have no idea how it scores so highly, and can only surmise that the Paizo fanboys are out in force, making excuses for one of, if not the first video game adaptation of the popular tabletop system. Or maybe people that kickstarted it trying to delude themselves that it was worth the money?