Thank you Owlcat Games for sending us this game to review!

Its a beautiful day in Kenabres, the sun is shining, the sky is cloudless, the perfect day for a festival. Unfortunately for the leaders of the city, this lovely day will turn into something worse.

The game begins with character creation, when the player starts a new game the options then begin. They are tasked with creating the main character of the game, and there are many choices. Not only the name, but also male or female, race, and class. There are not too many options for the already added profile pictures, but that can be added manually if the player does not like any of the choices. The different body parts such as head, body and hair does not have many different choices either, but there is enough to make it so the character doesn't feel cookie cutter.

Wrath of the Righteous is based off the Table Top Role Playing game created by Paizo called Pathfinder First Edition, and those that are familiar with that game will be familiar with the rest of the character creation process. Even if the player isn't familiar with the system, it is very easy to make a character. The player is presented with the choice of race of which there are quite a few options; each race provides different bonuses such as Elves get a bonus to their Dexterity and Intelligence but get suffer from lower Constitution whereas Humans get to to pick which bonus stat to put their point in and they get a free feat. Once the race has been selected, the next option is the character's class. Again, as with race, there are many different classes from Fighter to Rogue to Wizard to any different combinations. Each class has a difficulty rating on how hard it is to play as well. Once the player finishes choosing and setting up the class, the game starts.

When finished making the character and finalizing it, the game begins with the Festival in Kenabres. After a brief introduction of some characters, the game delves into its first form of communication "text". This game has a lot of text, so be prepared for a lot of reading. Each section of text is usually no more than a few sentences before it gives the player either the option of continuing the text or gives them options on how to respond to the information the text provided. Some of the text is also read via a voice actor during the important parts of the game which makes it more immersive.

One of the big draws of this game is the choices that it allows the player. With most text sections, there are points where the player must make choices on how to respond. Some of the choices will be generic, like thanking someone for their help, while other choices can lead to good/bad/lawful or chaotic alignment changes. The game will show which response does what so if the player is playing a truly good character, they will know to not choose any of the evil options (such as attacking merchants for their wares). Some of the choices will also involve skill checks, like trying to persuade someone to sell an item at a lower price. The game will make a skill check based on the player's skill and then if they player passes, the price will be lowered.

There are a lot of choices and each of them has the potential to alter how the game plays out. The player can spare an enemy and later down the road, the enemy can re-appear with multiple other enemies. The player can also choose to kill an enemy only to find out if they had spared the enemy, said enemy would be found later and either give them access to some secret items or possible provide a shortcut in their current mission. The player can decide to help a family out of a dangerous situation only to find out that because they did that some character that they were supposed to find was killed thus making their current mission harder to complete. The player has the option of being a bad guy, a good guy, or something in between and a lot of choices will affect something later within the game.

As the game progresses, the player will be able to recruit other NPCs to join their group and each NPC has a different class and offers different benefits in battle. One of the first characters that joins is a human paladin that excels in fighting with sword and shield. While later the player can pick up a demon ranger that focuses on long range attacks. The most characters that the player can have on their team at one time is 6 counting the main character that the player created. The other NPCs that were recruited will stay in the main base during each of the chapters and can be switched to the main team by visiting that location again.

The battle system in Wrath of the Righteous can be run in one of two ways. The main way is real-time battle where all the characters move at the same time. This way requires a more watchful eye on how things run because depending on the default way of attack some characters (ie mages) will move in to attack with a melee weapon, however it is a faster battle system and battles can end quickly. The player can pause and then issue commands to each of the characters they control and they will follow those commands and then switch back to their default form of attack after they finish. They can also slow down the flow of time during battles so they don't have to pause the game every few seconds. The downside of this form of play is that all the characters and enemies go at the same time, so the enemies can often get off their attacks.

The second way to run the battle is the Turned Based system. This system is more like the tabletop version of Pathfinder where each of the people involved in the battle has an initiative roll that determines when they will take their turn in battle. Then whenever the player's character's turns come up, the player will decide if they need to move and what attacks or spells to use. The benefits of this form of play is that sometimes all the enemies can be destroyed before they even get to make a move, the downside is that if the enemy is a boss, they get to go through all their full round of attacks which can be quite devastating. There are definitely benefits and issues with each form of battle, but the player can switch to either mode during gameplay even in the middle of a battle.

Outside of battle, the player moves their character and the other NPCs that are part of their current team using the mouse and clicking on the part of the map that the player wants to move them to. The characters can either be moved individually or in a group. There are a few reasons to move any of the characters around on their own from using one character around a trap in order to disarm it, or possibly scout out the area since they are the stealthiest of the group. Sometimes the player just wants to position the characters better before a battle ensues so that they control which character is closest to the enemy when the battle starts. Moving in a group is beneficial for keeping all the playable characters together so that if a fight does happen to break out, then at least everyone is close enough to take part in the battle.

As the players move their characters throughout the world, often they will run into random encounters which can take the form of an NPC providing a side quest, or random enemy encounters, or even running into merchants with special items. Other things that the player will have to pay attention to is when their characters sleep. As the characters move from place to place the player will be informed that the characters are tired and need to rest. Then the player has the choice of either continuing as they were or resting. If they continue on, the characters in their group will suffer fatigue that makes them slower and less likely to hit the enemy. Instead if the player decides to let the characters rest, they must assign positions in the camp that can provide benefits for the next day and also keep your camp from being attacked during the night.

The graphics of the game are very nice; the map is broken into different locations, so there are a bit more loading times. Due to that the areas are very beautifully rendered and there is very little to no lag even when there are a lot of people in the current map. The camera is an overhead camera so the player is always looking down on the characters and they can move the camera around to get a better view of an area or try to see different things. There is even an area in the game that makes the player swivel the camera to different angles to open up paths for the characters to traverse. I did run into a few graphical glitches though nothing game breaking; however, a lot of the issues were addressed and fixed in later patches.

Every area of the game had some sort of music playing and it was great. And it all played to the ambiance of the areas they were in nicely. The voice acting was on par as well. While the whole game wasn't voice acted, certain places that they wanted the player to pay attention to were given voice overs as well as having the text out for the player to read through. All in all, I was very happy with the sounds of the game and had no issues with them at all.

The controls were keyboard and mouse exclusively, but as with some games they were not complicated to figure out. The mouse is mostly used for movement and camera positioning and really it could be used without the keyboard. Though the keyboard made things easier as it could also control camera position as well as used to progress dialog options and also choose which actions a character could use if it was on the quick bar. The keyboard options can be changed from within the game options if so desired.

Unfortunately, this game does sometimes have bugs that can affect gameplay. I ran into a few during my time playing through the campaign. Some of the bugs were if I was fighting a boss type character in Turn Based mode, no matter what damage I did, they wouldn't lose any life. However, I was able to get around that by switching off Turn Based mode and that fixed the issue, and I could continue on. As far as I know this issue was never fixed, but it has a work around. The other issue that unfortunately broke my run, was after one of the updates, I lost my mythic hero levels and I had no way to get it back. I put in a ticket with the developers for this but as of writing this I have not heard anything back. That being said, I still really enjoyed playing this game. The storytelling and the game play made this game extremely enjoyable even with the game ending bug I experienced. And looking through the forums of the bugs, I was not able to find any other player that ran into this issue so it may have just been a one-off bug since I played it in beta.

Morality is unfortunately where this game runs into its biggest issues. There is not much swearing in the game, I did run across a few uses of b***h but that seems to have been the extent of it. The game is based in a high magic fantasy world. Magic is a big part of the game as well as a lot of magical beings. Some of the character choices that the player can choose are heavily magic involved, from casting fireballs to summoning skeletons or demons. There are a lot of magical symbols throughout the game like pentagrams, and in one quest, you run across some demons performing a magical ritual to turn humans into demons. And there is talk of human sacrifice as well as views of altars with a body on top of it.

The game itself is heavy on the violence; in the opening scene a character dies and there is a lot of blood. There are dead bodies of humans in some of the maps and most enemies that are killed stay in the position they fell in until the player leaves that specific map at which point, they disappear. There is a lot of blood and some gore. The player kills both fantasy monsters and humans throughout the gameplay (some as having no choice, but there are a few that the player can spare or kill if so desired). The player can even participate in killing innocent people too.

While I found no nudity within the game, there are a few points were there are scantily clad women and men. Sex is discussed a few times, especially within a brothel that can be found within the game. The player can have their main character have sex, however, they never show anything and no sounds can be heard, they just transport to a different room saying the encounter is over. While they only allow the choice for male or female character, the player can make their character either gay or lesbian. While not every npc will fall for both sexes, some of them will and others will only go for characters of the same sex. One of the main NPCs in the game is a female that is married to another woman.

Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is an extremely enjoyable game, filled with a lot of choices that makes multiple play throughs fun. Character development was done well, the voice acting was superb, the music was great. There is a lot of text however which can turn people off if they do want to spend the time reading. I found the overall storyline to be very engaging and every choice seemed to make future issues either easier or more difficult to deal with. I would definitely recommend the game for people that enjoy the Pathfinder Table Top game as well as people that like the crpg (Computer Role Playing Game) genre, however it does definitely deal with some dark topics so that is something to be wary of.

As always, consider any appropriateness issues before making a choice as to play this game or not, but if the things mentioned do not bother you, then I think this would definitely be a good choice for any RPG fan.