While I bought this game back when it was released, after my early experiences with the Pathfinder games I decided to wait to play it until after the first set of DLC were available.
I’ve just cleared the second chapter now and can say that so far it’s really good, being only the second Warhammer-related game I’ve consistently enjoyed (the first was Mechanicus, although Chaosbane and Gladius weren’t unplayable). While character building can certainly be confusing the actual combat systems are pretty straight-forward and the non-DLC areas have a smooth difficulty curve with plenty of dialog choices.
Basically in combat you’ll be presented with one to three strong targets accompanied by five to ten trash mobs for each and the idea is to massacre the weaklings with AOE attacks to trigger your heroic abilities which will then destroy the stronger ones. Most battles should be over in under four turns assuming you haven’t gone with completely ineffective leveling choices (like raising Strength on a ranged character) and have decent reputation levels with the various traders (using the PF stat as a perquisite for free items instead making you pay for things is a neat touch).
Moving on, the colony system is sort of extraneous and (like character building) laden with traps while world map travel looks far more complicated than it actually is. While browsing the wiki I ended up throwing together a basic cheat sheet with a travel itinerary alongside puzzle solutions, notable colony project highlights, and faction reputation targets.
For this first playthrough I went with a ranged mage-like Pyromancer build and was somewhat disappointed, sure they can blast apart single targets or a clustered group of enemies… but the bladedancer NPC can clear like half the map herself. Perhaps that’s an unfair comparison though since the power-level of the DLCs is notably higher than in the base game. Very noticeably higher, and if you do the associated quests when they become available you’ll likely have a challenging experience. While I did manage to clear them on Daring difficulty without much trouble I wasn’t experimenting with character builds at the time (that’s for a second playthrough).
Speaking of which:
Void Shadows includes a massive amount of content that heavily fleshes out the second chapter along with a new party member and archetype option, both of which are insanely good. Definitely pick it up if you have the chance.
Lex Imperialis doesn’t add as much content to chapter two (fortunately, since it’s getting kind of bloated) but does also include a new companion and archetype alongside shields as a new variety of weapon. While I like the equipment and leveling options quite a bit, the NPC isn’t particularly impressive one way or the other.