This review is a hard one for me.

I LOVE this game, clearly. I wouldn't have spent 450 hours playing it if I didn't. Pathfinder WOTR is a great game...but there are many aspects in which it is not a "good" game, which is what makes it difficult to recommend unless you are a particular kind of person.

I, like many other people, came to WOTR after playing Baldur's Gate 3. Prior to BG3, I did not have any experience with D&D, Pathfinder, or any CRPGs. My only TTRPG experience was a single campaign of Call Of Cthulhu, and 90% of my video games were racing games like Forza, Trackmania, etc.

WOTR is mechanically much more technical than BG3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2 (another contemporary competitor from Larian). There are far more classes/subclasses, the way stat bonuses are calculated is much more nuanced, there are multiple types of AC that you must consider, and there are an incredible amount of feats to choose from - just to name a few things. It is very easy to create a character build that doesn't work well, and the game is not forgiving. You also cannot respec your party until Chapter 2. Unlike BG3, you cannot fully respec your companions (you can only reset them to the level & class they were when they first joined your party), you can only respec a limited amount of times before it costs gold, and the ability to respec is completely removed on harder difficulties. The game does provide some "automatic" builds for your companions if you don't want to think about it, but they aren't amazing. Once you learn what does and does not work for builds, you can create some pretty powerful characters, and there are so many classes and abilities in WOTR that I wish were possible in BG3 (e.g. the bloodrager class, or animal mounts). If you like nerding out over character sheets, you will love WOTR.

The gameplay is pretty solid for the most part. I mostly use turn-based mode, and I love that I can hit the spacebar to make animations go faster. While I don't use RTwP mode much for combat, it does reduce the amount of time you spend in battle - which is nice, since there are a LOT of battles, to the point where it can sometimes feel kind of grind-y. The "fog of war" visibility took some getting used to, and I admittedly prefer how BG3 and DOS2 handle visibility when you're exploring instead. Characters are pretty dumb when it comes to pathfinding - they'll walk right over traps and spells without even trying to avoid them. The maps are...fine...but I feel like BG3 and DOS2 have better-designed encounters with maps and arenas that encourage you to strategize for fights, while the norm in WOTR is to just walk up to your enemies and start hitting them - even the bosses. The puzzles suck and I recommend just looking up the solutions in online guides rather than wasting time trying to figure them out (especially Nenio's whole quest...ugh...).

The difficulty in WOTR is mostly designed around pumping up the stats of your enemies (especially AC) and throwing a bunch of them at you, rather than forcing you to come up with tactics and adapt on the fly to defeat them like BG3 and DOS2 do. The fights are also balanced so that you are expected to buff before them and quicksave after them. If you find a fight or dungeon to be too difficult, there is nothing stopping you from opening the pause menu and dropping the difficulty (which affects enemy stats too), and then raising it back up if you want later. Nobody will know.

Graphically, WOTR is fine. DOS2 is older but looks better, and BG3 runs just as well on my system despite being newer and much more pretty. The character models are pretty low-quality up close. WOTR isn't ugly though, and there are areas where I think it does better than DOS2 - like AOE status effects. In terms of stability, I think I've only had it crash on me once or twice, and otherwise I haven't really had any bugs aside from one part of Pulura Falls where a character always gets stuck in the corner of one particular room. Owlcat is still releasing patches every few months which is nice to see.

The story differs depending on which "mythic path" you choose. I've personally played Aeon, Azata, Demon, and Dragon. The different stories are of varying quality, but I will say that the Demon story is a lot of fun if you're looking to do a "corruption" arc or "evil" character, and I found the Aeon story to be really satisfying for a lawful-alignment character. The Dragon story was lackluster, but mechanically it was a lot of fun to play. I wasn't a fan of the Azata story but I know some people out there really like it. All of the mythic paths share the same "true ending," although that ending is extremely difficult to achieve organically due to the crazy amount of intricate steps you have to take to reach it. Otherwise, they have unique endings, and many have sub-paths that affect outcomes as well (for example, the Aeon path will categorize you as "True," a "Rebel," or a "Devil" depending on the choices you make). Your companions will have different outcomes for their own stories too depending on your choices with them, although these are integrated so well that you often won’t know it unless you've done multiple playthroughs.

WOTR requires a lot of reading. If you've come this far in my review, I'm assuming that's not a problem. There is some voice acting, but only during important story dialogues, and even then it may suddenly vanish in the middle of the conversation because those particular lines weren't recorded. The story writing is generally good quality albeit overly wordy (like this review), but the character dialogue often leaves something to be desired. I’ve had several friends who tried to get into WOTR but gave up because it "had too much reading," so this is your warning.

The elephant in the room is Crusade Mode. It's not fun. There is an "auto-crusade" option that lets you avoid it, but turning it on locks you out of the "true ending." The interface is also terrible and there are SO many loading screens. There's one when you open the map, one when you switch to the Crusade Management screen, one when you switch back to party/army management, and then one once you finally reach your destination on the map itself. That doesn't include any loading screens from random encounters en route to your destination. Fast travel also doesn't exist until you unlock bastions and build teleporters. Even then, you can only use it once per day, and only to those specific locations where you built the teleporters. This makes Chapter 3 and Chapter 5 feel like a bit of a slog without mods.

WOTR was crowdfunded on Kickstarter with a budget of about $2 million, releasing in 2021. DOS2 was also crowdfunded on Kickstarter with a budget of about $2 million, releasing in 2018. DOS2 feels like a much more polished game with full voice acting, nicer graphics, better performance (and fewer loading screens), and more effort put into its maps and encounters. WOTR has a much greater scope than DOS2, which is both a blessing and a curse - yes, it allows CRPG/TTRPG nerds to go all-out, but sometimes it feels as if Owlcat bit off more than they could chew. I personally think that the game would have been far better off without Crusade Mode, since it would have allowed the developers to focus more of their time/budget on things like balancing, writing/voice acting, the map, and graphics/performance.

If you do pick this up, I recommend downloading the Toybox and Visual Adjustments 2 mods. Toybox allows you to re-spec for free and also enables a lot of quality-of-life features that aren't present in the base game (and it can be used to cheat in Crusade Mode...). Visual Adjustments 2 allows finer customization of your character's appearance.

You can often pick the base game up for $12 USD on sale. If you're the kind of person who gets really invested in this type of game, that's a steal.

Women are so GOATed

Pathfinder CRPG's are top notch,