TL;DR: I got this bloated buggy mess with all DLC for about 10 dollars and I got ripped off at that price. My hours played and this being a negative review should tell you everything.
The game starts you off small and weak and takes you through a journey that ends with you and your party gaining awesome power and interacting with some of the strongest characters in the setting. The problem is that every element of the game fights you in your attempt to enjoy that journey. I am writing this review before I beat the game, but I feel this is appropriate because the developers might also never finish this game.
Pathfinder is based on a version of Dungeon and Dragons that was later simplified. Wrath of the Righteous uses the first version of Pathfinder remixes it in their own way. WotR does such a poor job of explaining how everything works together that you would think they came up with something else entirely! It is worth mentioning that both DnD and Pathfinder have both become much simpler over time because of the absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bloat of rules and interactions they ended up creating. This game inherits and wallows in the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bloat but calls it "deep" and "flexible".
Your very first choices (race, starting bonuses, class) seem so deep and varied that you might spend hours here just trying to find something that fits what you have in your head. Tons of classes and subclasses to do things in ways you don't expect, so you spend tons of time reading up on what is available. Do you really need all of these choices? For a new player, there is simply so much that it will overwhelm them. However, these choices are not that meaningful at all! They don't even change much over the first few hours. You see, this game depends on stat inflation for it's difficulty, so you will be stacking buffs and googling guides for half of your play time until you decide to continue a suboptimal run or start over because you won't know you've made a mistake until much later on. Couldn't a better tutorial explain things and save you the trouble? There's no way to look ahead so what's the point of choices when you don't know what you're getting down the line? There's a respec option but it's not ideal, and it is there as a band-aid over bad design.
Then you're plopped down onto this fantasy world (with strange, US West Coast 21st century urban liberal politics, ethics and views on gender among other things) and soon enough you are in combat. Why are there two combat modes? You have a choice of Real Time with Pause (RTwP) and Turn-based, but they don't function in exactly the same way. Turn-based runs every character turn separately (with a "bar" that shows your time and actions remaining) but RTwP is just an action-rpg with cooldowns between certain actions. These are two very different ways of presenting the gameplay! Can someone at Owlcat make up their mind and choose one game to make instead of fitting two of them together? I know someone gave them that advice, because they didn't try anything this dumb with Rogue Trader. This game throws at you all of these buffs that become mandatory, class interactions that give you more and more actions, and all of it melds together into a goo of big numbers in the middle of a mosh pit; so why was real-time even an option? This obviously should have been a turn-based game! Why would anyone deny themselves the tools of the very system they chose to use for this game? At the very least you can swap between the modes at any time, which is itself a strange thing to be able to do mid-game since it drastically alters the difficulty. Speaking of which, you can also dynamically change the difficulty mid-game, which would've been a great feature had that menu not been a mess as well.
This game runs badly and it is proud of it. Plenty of lag, inconsistent (and frequent) load times, tooltip words that aren't highlighted and elements don't respond to mouse clicks. Your characters will spin in place, freak out when you click to move or attack, and the game will simply freeze and lag with no real reason. My first character is a gendarme, and for the life of him, he can't stay on that horse to do anything. When it's time to open a door, my character spins rapidly in place (probably to escape to another game) and the door stays shut. I have to move them (and the party) back and forth a few times or select another character before trying to open the door again. I have this and similar issues with every other interactable item, so looting corpses, containers, disarming traps, talking to others, everything comes with all these rough, repetitive and buggy wastes of time. These are old complaints that will never get a fix.
The design of the combat encounters and the stages and areas you visit also sucks. The game is divided into major acts that vary greatly in the freedom you have in moving around the world. Some acts you move in a party of up to 6 characters + pets and in others you additionally control armies on a large world map. I will focus on this second "Crusade" mode first: The army combat, part of the game's story involving a war with hordes of demons, seems to be a holdover from a phone game the devs never released (/s) because all you need to beat it is one busted gacha character (shoutout to Setsuna Shy). Your armies can have generals, and a couple of the generals have abilities so powerful it doesn't really matter what army they are leading because their magic is strong enough to wipe everything out. The entire (boring) loop of building up forts, moving armies around, recruiting troops, it's all meaningless because of these uber-powerful generals. Who designed this part of the game? Did they talk to anyone else? These generals trivialize everything in a game that is already rough around the edges and too big for it's own good. A couple of these generals can run around and mop up the whole demon invasion, deflating any tension you might have felt.
Back to the regular combat encounters: there's simply too much! Some dungeons have puzzles and others have tidbits of lore, but you always feel like they could've been smaller and more densely packed instead of being big and full of trash. You revisit some of these areas after they have been cleared out the first time and you spend so much time just walking everywhere. Remember my mounted knight character? He gets dismounted randomly between scene transitions and conversations, and he needs a straight clear path to do his signature charge but the maps and fights aren't designed for that. He's dismounted randomly too because the game loves to set up fights as 900 IQ conversation-ambushes. Instead of becoming memorable encounters and areas, these drawn out sections turned to frustration with the game's own systems and design choices. It's just too much game too poorly designed.
I could talk about the itemization, the DLC, the music and visual presentation of the areas, but it's always the same flaw: they bit off more than they could chew and it shows. The last thing I want to talk about is the plot and the characters: this game is based on an existing and playable adventure path put out by Paizo and I think Owlcat must have messed up the adaptation somehow because so many characters are just dumb and make insane decisions. I am not going to spoil anything here but the least I can say is that the world should have been more reactive to your choices and not willing to let anything slide. It would have created unique and more varied playthroughs if everyone wasn't just going along with whatever you want until the very end of the game, and I include villains and companions in this. It's just not finished, like everything else to do with this game, but it at least had some promise in the first two acts.
