Tl;dr - One of the best games that I never want to play again.

In keeping with OwlCat’s well-earned reputation, the characters are all extremely well written and interesting, and the differing paths offer a variety of difference story experiences.

Crusade Mode, the turn-based strategy mechanic by which you command your armies against the demon hordes, is… there, I guess. It didn’t exactly blow me away, but I didn’t find it to be the slog that some people apparently did.

However, in true OwlCat fashion, late-game combat is an absolute slog. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a game throwing a stiff challenge at me so I feel accomplished and clever when I win, but WotR’s combat practically feels like punishment. Even on fairly modest difficulties, you will waste a staggering amount of time casting spells and using consumables in order to stack enough buffs for your party to stand a chance in combat against ridiculously overpowered foes at every turn.

If you’re someone who’s really into min-maxing builds, this might be appealing to you, but it definitely wasn’t what I was looking for.

It’s like reading a really good book, but someone is hovering over your shoulder, prepared to smash your fingers with a brick every time you go to turn the page. I'm glad I played WotR but, frankly, that aspect is enough to keep me from coming back to it for another run.

If you like crunchy RPGs and tabletop games, this game is actually fun and I like it. The rest of this review is going to be a large complaint, however, because I would not recommend it to anyone I know, including the many tabletop RPG players in my life.

However, this game is *not* well-designed - it is in fact a crime against the entire discipline of game design. A couple of issues repeat themselves over and over again:

1. The game consistently throws mechanics at you before the counter is available. So far, I have encountered:

Ability damage before Lesser Restoration is available
(Permanent) Blindness before Remove Blindness is available
Stinking Cloud before Communal Delay Poison is available (lol 3-4 round disable on average, you ♥♥♥♥, why don't you roll better)
Dominate Person before Communal Protection from Evil is available
Dying before Restoration is available (the game gives you two uses of raise dead at the beginning of the game, but *no* uses of Restoration, so you'll just have a permanent debuff)

And I am being generous with availability here. If you decided to play an Oracle or Sorcerer instead of a Cleric or Wizard? Ha ha, you ♥♥♥♥, get good. Some of these you will encounter even before the first scroll merchant, so you can't even deal with the issues with consumables! This is literal insanity. If it happened on tabletop, the GM's photo would be in the Wikipedia article for "bad gamemastery".

2. Encounters are designed to be save scummed. Imagine a GM that takes the "encounters per adventuring table" page of their book, rips it out, and wipes their butt with it. Then wipes their dog's butt with it. They are very difficult, to the point where you need to know what is coming. Sometimes, they are difficult in an unreasonable way - for example, additional enemies will just appear in the middle of the fight and get inserted into initiative order, without you being able to do anything about it. Sometimes they will do that, and crit your main character for x3 damage, and then you immediately lose the game (lol git gud). Maybe this wouldn't be as bad if you could scout the encounters beforehand, but enemies inexplicably have double digits added to their Perception scores as compared to tabletop, for seemingly no reason. I am not joking. You might manage a Stealth of +13 at level 3 if you try hard. Random trash enemies will have +15-20 on their Perception, when the Bestiary gives them +5. Why? It would be bad if you had information to make good decisions with. You should just find out that information the same way everyone else does, F5+F8. Reloading so much is pretty unfun, it takes away from the heroic conceit if you lose 80% of the time on some fights and only win because either you got lucky, or have perfect knowledge of all enemy behavior and positions from reloading.

Yes, both of these can be solved with difficulty, but the design of the achievements actively discourages you from doing that. Beyond that - Core is very clearly the "default challenging" difficulty level, regardless of whatever warnings Owlcat may throw in. It's the level that does not nerf enemies compared with their tabletop stats and does not buff the player. Quite frankly, I would rather eat a rusty nail than play a video game on a difficulty level that:

1. Gives me undeserved buffs
2. Gives enemies undeserved nerfs
3. Takes away achievements for doing so

It is simply no longer rewarding at that point.

Beyond that

3. BUGS. This game is 4 years old as of this writing, and I encounter dozens of bugs every session. Nothing has been a show-stopper, it's just a lot of QoL and mechanics not working as intended.

4. The UI does not give you all the information you need to make good tactical decisions, in turn-based mode. e.g. you don't know whether a character is going to be threatening an enemy after moving, you don't know whether your character is going to be one pixel into a ground effect and get proned/restrained as a result. Game should have been turn-based first with a grid, like Rogue Trader. RTWP is, and will always be an abomination.

tl;dr Pathfinder video game, but extreme Eurojank technology, and with a GM that would make the ghost of Gary Gygax cry "toxic design".

I didn't even access game play. I spent over an hour slogging through the 15+ character creation screens (each with MANY things to personalize, and hundreds of options), then found out it needed to be leveled up 6 times before the main story line could even be accessed. I don't have any issue setting up a character for a game, but for it to take this long and not even be playable...that's not an investment I'm down for.