Reviews

Good game that is unknown due to its less than stellar marketing. 

I remembering really liking this game's story when I played it on console. It's dark. It's depressing. It fucks you up in a good way. However, I understand a lot of people aren't into that sort of stuff, and the art style/marketing for this game makes it seem it will be a cute, lighthearted platformer with an interesting story, but not one that's too dark. When you actually play it it meshes fairly well imo. It's like a visual novel. 

But the previews of the game make it very unclear what type of vibe this game is trying to for, and how it will handle its story. Because of this, I think a lot of people got turned off from it (thinking it's just a cutesy simple platformer), or started playing it and were let down. If the game's marketing was more honest, maybe have some sort of graphical editing (like longer/more animated trailers) to show the tone of this game better, I think Iconoclasts would have quickly become an indie cult classic. 

Story the side, the gameplay is fun and well-rounded. Everything is polished, including the UI. I will say tweaks don't feel like they do much, and that some boss fights feel a bit boring. But there's a lot of them, and they're not super easy, so I found the overall gameplay to be very satisfying.

Pathfinder Kingmaker is a CRPG that feels pride in it's table top roots and tries hard to emulate that feeling while taking inspiration from more contemporary CRPGs and I'd say they mostly succeeded in that vision with some hiccups.
1st the positives :
• The character creation is very deep, possibly overwhelming for new players. But once you get a hold of it, it's very rewarding with how much build variety can be done.
• The Pathfinder table-top rule set makes for very engaging battles. It used to be very hard at launch, relying more on rng luck but after several patches I think it's quite fair now. Using proper buffs, feats and spells to counter the enemy strength never stops being exciting.
• Without going into spoilers I'd say the story while nothing groundbreaking works well enough to keep the player invested. Each story arc has enough plot intrigue to have it's own game but since there's so many, individually they feel a bit shallow. Despite this complaint I would argue that it works to serve the larger narrative.
• Companion characters have actual personality with history and are not just stand ins for their race, this I greatly appreciated. I loved the camp side banter and how they can interject during story moments. Having to have them in party for romance to trigger properly was nice too.
• Kingdom management mini game is quite fun with choices than can have consequences with the companions. Watching your city having the buildings you built show up in the map screen never got old for me. Small side quests from unlocked locations were nice too.
• The visual design is gorgeous with perfect use of special effects. Using powerful AOE spells never got old. But I wish the game had camera rotation like D:OS2.   
• Voice acting for the most part was great and added to the immersion. Though I wish important story dialogues weren't half voiced, either keep it silent or voice it fully. Having to hear half dialogues in great voice acting and having to imagine the rest took me out of experience slightly, though this is a minor nitpick.
• The music, my god. Inor Zur is a genius and it shows. Every tracks fits the game ambience just right and quite a few of those I would listen to ousdide of the game too.

Now for the parts that in my opinion can be improved:
• 1st point has to be bugs. I'm glad how much the devs have worked to fix the bugs and balance issues of the game but still there is some work to be done. I ran into 2 broken quest that was supposed to be fixed and a few visual glitches here and there. Saving takes too much time and it needs to be fixed, taking 7-8 seconds for a quick save during later parts of the game is unacceptable. Fortunately there's a mod.
• Although visually gorgeous, I'm not that impressed with level design. Specially during earlier positions of the game you get kinda bland maps purely carried by the quest story you have in mind instead of visual story telling. 1st World was a breath of fresh air but even that went stale soon. Also I feel they are too open and lack strategic use like in POE, but it will be a very subjective opinion. Unique locations aside from main quest that have optional bosses often reuses same locations. Maybe this where the kickstarter budget shows most.
• The companions need more flavor text to flesh them out. After you initially meet and talk with them, there's nothing to talk about for 20-30 hours before their companion quest kicks in and even then it's just a couple of lines at most. At the least they should have dialogues after each important story event. Also longer dungeons needs some side story in the form of notes or something. Idk about others but fighting similar enemies over and over without discovering fun stuff about the location is boring. I hope the story's better in the future games too.
• There are unsual difficulty spikes in the game, specially towards the end. Hopefully will get more balance patches.
• A personal grievance but I dislike the over reliance on RNG in everything. I know that's how table top games are probably but on higher difficulties you are forced to reload not because you did something wrong but because the enemy just had a higher roll than you. That is not fun. I'm so glad DOS2 moved away from it although armor system needs some fixing.

Overall it's very fun game and a solid entry into the CRPG genre.