Generally speaking, the enemies and monsters Geralt confronts aren't that difficult. After adding a couple move enhancements, players will dispose of them with just a few sword swings. However, the game often sets Geralt up to lose. One quest has him getting drunk, and before the player knows what happens, he gets shoved out (without his sword drawn) in front of two large creatures spitting damage at him. Drunkenness blurs the screen, slows Geralt's movement and decreases his damage. As a result, he ends up losing half his health before players fully understand what happened. Similarly, when he hunts down a band of thugs, he gets pushed into a tiny area with no room to maneuver, where a gang instantly descends upon him.
Geralt seems like a guy just looking for something to do. He spends an inordinate amount of time wandering around, looking for random encounters. Gamers can pick up special hunting quests called Contracts, but he can't complete them until he brushes up on his monster lore and learns all about the creature before confronting it and collecting trophies. That assumes the quest doesn't get broken, the way it did when we furthered one of the primary quests before collecting the reward for one of our side ones. It resulted in everyone at the local inn evacuating, including the person who was supposed to give us a bounty.
The Witcher also has a day and night cycle, with the worst monsters coming out in the evening. Although there's nothing wrong with this, areas to rest and further the clock are spread out, and nothing is quite as annoying as waiting for some NPC to wake up, or for the sun to set so that some monsters can finally rise out of the water, but all of these issues build up to a larger one. It's hard to care about the story or any of the characters. Even though the game graphics generate some pretty good looking characters, they all lack facial expressions, and most don't even use hand gestures. With that said, characters rattle off lines while staring blankly into space, like statues with moving mouths. This game even has the silly role-playing convention where players can walk into any house and poke through the cupboards, cabinets and chests to take anything they please without repercussions. Then toss in the side story about non-human races like Dwarves and Elves forming guerilla squads against humans, and the narrative becomes almost impossible to take seriously, especially since the humans nicknamed these groups "squirrels."
With the annoying combat, uninteresting characters and messy dialogue, it's probably a good thing that The Witcher lost his memory.
Reader Comments (2)
The developers of "The Witcher" deserve critical acclaim for this title, whoever wrote this review should be fired. This game does not deserve a 60%. Whoever wrote this review deserves an F because they fail at life. These kinds of negative reviews are made by people who clearly don't understand the game but feel entitled to criticize it by using statements like "It bored me" or "The characters just stare into space when speaking" as the basis for their contrived opinions, ultimately hurt new developers and new games. I hope the author at least feels better about himself by publicly panning something great. The author of this review is incompitent and shouldn't be allowed to review a game ever again. Either that, or they simply weren't endowed with the skills necessary to play this kind of game, and I recommend they stick to reviews of games like Bejeweled, and Peggle, which clearly seems to be closer to their level of comprehension.
A remarkably incompetent and irrelevant review. The author even didn't bother to find out who the actual developer was, mixing it up with the publisher. In general this writing makes an impression of glancing and generally inadequate, especially concerning the characters and dialog part, which makes the majority of the game essence. Tough and mature decision making content, free of black and white cliches typical for modern RPG games, as well as the results of your past judgments haunting you later in game weren't mentioned by the author either. However, as i haven't played an English-localized version of the game (its polish in origin) i'm not at the liberty of making any statements on the quality and diversity of dialog there. Thus, search for a more qualified assessment of this title on the more prominent review boards over the internet.