Recent reviews by uhm

Pathfinder: WotR is a game that does not respect your time. This statement is not even related to the game's length, which is quite impressive by itself. It's about how this game does a poor job of helping you play the game itself.

The game plunges you into a tutorial that does help you with the absolute basics in the first part of the game. This is all well and good, but the game completely abandons the idea of providing any helpful information on later chapters. You'll often find yourself trying to understand game mechanics through the in-game encyclopedia, only to realize how nearly useless it is. You may run into descriptions like "This spell has the effects of spell X..." without describing or linking to spell "X" in question. Or you may find one of your characters with an affliction with no description on how to remove it (is it with rest? Restoration? Remove curse? Dispel? Who knows). You'll be discarding the encyclopedia and ending up relying on external sources.

And the game lies to you. "There are no wrong choices", except there are. You can try to lean in to the role-playing aspect and create a character based on that, only to find that it will not be viable on later chapters (the game does allow you to re-spec in certain difficulties). The game will also recommend auto-leveling for your companions. Your auto-leveled companions will be nearly useless in later chapters. You will, once again, have to rely on external sources to be able to build your party and start enjoying the game.

Which brings my next point. The game is very combat-oriented. Almost every situation is only or best resolved by combat. The game will even add random enemies just to pad the game with "content". The absence of alternative content types will leave you exhausted by the repetitive combat loop. The few puzzles the game has are ruined by the use of an awful interface. These two criticisms are exemplified by one of the companion quests dungeons, where you will spend hours juggling between endless enemies and horrible UI for puzzles.

Even if you know what you're doing and do things right, you'll end up wasting your time with constant save scumming. Oh yes, the game kind of expects you to save scum, as it is very common to even fail "easy" dice rolls constantly.

On another note, a game that relies on the boring, continuous ritual of pre-buffing just to level the playing field is not being clever. Raising numbers with 6 different buffs just to be able to hit an enemy is a mindless chore, not strategy.

The game offers a lot of replayability through the different mythic paths and their respective content, but with a lack of new game plus options (carry over money and items at least), I wouldn’t be incentivized to play over a hundred hours of this game again.

Many people may add that mods and other resources can vastly improve this game's experience. But in my opinion, any game that relies on external resources like this already failed to do what should have been the main goal of being a fun, accessible and fully encompassing experience.

Finally, the very last ending scene sort of implies you screwed up you 100+ hour playthrough because you didn't follow the very-specific steps for the secret ending. A final slap in the face for the whole experience really.

I would only recommend this game to people who are already Pathfinder fans, DnD enthusiasts, or masochists. Or you could just breeze through the game on the easiest difficulty and enjoy the amazing characters and story. An "Enhanced - Enhanced Edition" for this one may be a stretch but hopefully future games in the series are better.

Extra criticisms: no minimap, no option to place map markers, quest journals don't update properly. The annoying bug where enemies run out of bounds and you have to reload entire fights because you can't kill the enemy that yeeted itself into the void (even in boss fights).

Playtime says everything.

Not much to say, better than the previous one and certainly a more interesting story as well.