Originally I was going to wait until completing the game‘s first chapter before commenting, but after getting utterly destroyed by what should be trash mobs for like the 10th time I’m honestly not sure I want to play it much more.
The first thing that stands out is the absolutely massive amount of character creation options available to you; I spent literally hours just looking through the various class/subclass progressions to try and figure out what character I wanted to try (ending up with a Hexcrafter).
When you actually start playing though the first thing that stands out is how small everything is. The camera is very zoomed in, you can’t unzoom it very much, and the maps are pretty cramped… particularly considering that there’s a fairly ridiculous number of enemies lurking about on them. Numbers alone wouldn’t be much of problem if it weren’t for the fact that enemies are commonly 2 or more levels above you (and give practically no XP).
House at the End of Time aside, Kingmaker was pretty well balanced as long as you knew what you were fighting. Here? Knowing what you’re fighting (demons, lots of demons) doesn’t matter much because you’re heavily outleveled and often outnumbered on top of it. Even knowing that the difficulty reverses itself later when the Mythic Path unlocks and you get to take advantage of broken synergies doesn’t much help in this early game when you have to re-load each encounter 5+ times to avoid having a single enemy critical hit 1-shot your party members.
That this part of the game has a hard time limit, meaning your resting is restricted, just adds insult to injury. I’m not thrilled about the plot development either as it’s pretty rail-roady so far and it makes no sense at all for people to treat you like some great hero when you’re just a level 2 character who got 1-shot by a demon.
I think I’m going to take a break and then try out the turn-based mode. That might make it easier since the party AI being pretty bad certainly isn’t helping.