Recent reviews by zels

Unless the patch notes are wrong a couple of small bug fixes just required a 17GB update. But hey, at least it gave me the time to write this review.

Games like this one don't come around too often. A wonderful, touching game that became one of my favourites of all time.

Two great games

Style over substance

Very buggy. Crashes that reset the settings, weird UI behavior, game sometimes starts windowed for no reason.

A game that gets so many things right and at the sames time so many more things wrong which all culminates in the last chapter that turns into an absolute unpleasant slog of a fetch quest.

Great for the first 10 or so hours, with interesting world building, characters and the typical Gothic feeling of rags-to-riches. Then the lockpicking game starts to become an annoyance. The game starts throwing too many enemies at the player at the same time and the melee fights turn into games of abusing the AI. Then, in the final chapter all the good bits (dialogue, reactive changing world and exploration of interesting locations) slow down to a trickle and it hits you with the worst fetch quest of the game that has to be repeated 5 times. You better enjoy combat against multiple enemies at a time, the lockpicking minigame and dark, underground corridors.

It's a shame because it's so close to being great and probably the closest thing to Gothic 2 next to ELEX.

There are significant issues with the characters, the overall plot, the pacing and the gameplay in Pathfinder.

My biggest problem lies at the heart of the plot – the game never establishes character motivation for the main character. The story revolves around becoming a ruler but never stops to ask “why”. We never find out why the main character cares to gain the title, or why every other person would rather serve. That core lack of motivation strips the story of meaning and impact and each presented decision becomes a meaningless act of balancing stats. Unfortunately, in an attempt to create a story that can revolve around a diverse set of possibilities across the spectrum of races/classes/alignments the developers created a story that revolves around a blank-slate who stands apart and doesn’t really belong in the world that they inhabit. This game is often compared to Baldur’s Gate but it couldn’t be further, and worse off, from it in this particular aspect.

Unfortunately the companion characters are not much better. They are boring, one-dimensional archetypical cliches who in most cases can be succinctly described using a single characteristic of their personality. It’s very rare that they will surprise you with their dialogue or have anything insightful to say about any of the events in the game. In general, there is very little introspection in the story – big events come and go but no one really offers much of a reaction beyond a single line of dialogue here and there. Again, when compared to Baldur’s Gate it legitimately feels like “shallowness of BG 1’s characters but delivered in a script that is multiple times larger” – a classic case of talking too much and saying too little.

The pacing and the overall gameplay may be the weakest aspect of the experience. There are strengths here but the game does not lean on them at all. It is a wonderful, deep implementation of the Pathfinder system and would serve a turn-based tightly designed experience very well. Instead of that, the game mixes and matches systems that don’t work and insists of padding everything with meaningless, time wasting filler.

Starting with the combat the game shines during challenging, well thought out turn-based encounters but those are extremely rare. Instead, most of the time it throws hordes and hordes of cannon fodder that will test anyone’s patience, even when played in the real time with pause mode.

Anything to do with being a ruler/managing the kingdom is just horrible – having to keep returning to the same place to make decisions that don’t have much impact; the obtuse base building and upgrade system that clashes horribly with all other aspects of the gameplay; the arbitrary success/failure system of every event; the watching numbers go up nature of it all.. I don’t understand why anyone wanting to play an RPG would see these as anything other than poorly designed distractions and yet it’s core to the experience – the game, after all, is about being a ruler and this is it, and unfortunately it just sucks.

Another big portion of the game is spent on travelling and it’s not great either. Too much time is dedicated to watching a dot move along the various roads on the world map. It’s not fun, it’s not engaging and once again it’s somehow worse than what existed in BG1 where you would click on a destination and the game would load it right away. It was quick, simple and kept the focus on what the game does best.

One other thing that absolutely needs to be discussed are the dice rolls. It is not fun to regularly fail a dice roll and take damage. It is also not fun to fail a dice roll and end up unable to open a chest until your party levels up. You know the drill by now, BG1 did it better. Arbitrary success/failure states work well in tabletop scenarios because they lead down two divergent paths and each can be used to tell an engaging, interesting story. Arbitrary success/failure states in computer games do not work well because they cause you to miss out on things without the benefit of a divergent path and save-scumming really really isn’t fun. If you want to have them in the game, limit them to the interactive story-book sequences where multiple outcomes can be explored in interesting ways.

Great sequel, expands on the first game without feeling superfluous.

resolution keeps resetting every level

The worst kind of survival horror - heavily scripted and pretty linear.