The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition

I think the creators played a lot of God of War before creating the sequel for one of the best RPGs of the mid 2000s. I loved the first Witcher, and the second game is wonderful in a lot of ways. However, the gameplay can be often a let down. Even the intro chapter is full of situation, when the authors try to improve opun the old adage with QTEs. The dragon chase in the tower is simply govern by a fleshing mouse icon. This is insulting for any person with a half brain. The combat system is borderline good, border line frustrating. For example: in the very beginning there is a fight scene in a tower: there is a small room with 3 enemies behind a door. The designer probably thought that how cool it is that in DMC or GoW, the doors are locked during fights, even if it makes no sense. I step through the doors and there is no way out. The inventory was clearly made for the X360, it is more difficult to navigate it than the old one. Another nice stupidity is the camera dependent controls. Again, beginning of the game, dragon fight: there is a corridor, player goes forward, there is a cinema, then lame QTE, then the camera is on the opposite side, so now player should push down to go forward. If player is not fast enough to recognize this, its instadeath. All-in-all, I am sure the creaters wanted to make the game more popular, and they were try to incorporate many things from the then succesful console games, but there are many additions that are just simply poorly implemented, and break the flow of the games. QTEs don't make a cinematic experience, QTEs can offend anyone with a little brain. Later on when the gameworld opens, the quality improves, the dialogues are good, the world is grate, it is just too bad there are some very bog step backs from the Witcher 1. I would like to give it a 4 starbecause it is a really good game, but at this point, with all the frustration in my heart, I think there are some very big flaws in this game compared to the Witcher 1.

HUD is horrible, it is unfunctional, counter-intuitive, painful, has mouse sensivity issues and it reminds me of worst types of console ports. Combat is chaotic, unresponsive and plainly not fun. It is big step back from the original game. You feel like your character is a bag of bricks instead of agile witcher. I'd love to say that story is good but issues mentioned above discourage me from playing further. Game still looks good in 2016.

In the shadow of The Wither 3, it certainly pales in comparison. Comparing the two is inevitable, but not really fair considering it is older. However, on its own it is a really great game. It is much more story driven with less open world than TW3 and thus quite a bit different. I played through before buying TW3 in order to get the back story. You don't need to play TW2 to enjoy 3, but I'm glad I did. Lots of references and even gwent cards make sense in TW3.

I was a huge fan of The Witcher 1 when it got out and had a PC with a good enough build to play without sacrificing quality and performances. When it broke, I had to wait five years to be able to afford a PC again and play The Witcher 2 — Enhanced Edition. Needless to say that I was very looking forward to play it, even more when I watched the superb introduction to the game again with the assassination of the King. But TW2 was much less thrilling to me than TW1, even though it looks beautiful. It felt short (as a story) and long at the same time (gathering plants, side quests) and less interesting. I feel like it pays a homage to the old RPG because of all the lines of dialogues between the different characters — you'll actually may end up reading TW2 more than playing it ! I'm disappointed by the game both because I may have expected too much from it and because I don't feel it's that much better than the first episode.

After playing W1 which had few bugs, but so many great ideas, I felt really limted in W2. Mini-games are really bad in here, and sometimes the flow of the story depends on them. Framerate sometimes does strange things so the keys are irresponsive. Usually when you need a block a blow, cast a sign or dodge and you have a milisecond to do it. I got used to it, but then many fights are in something like invisible "arena" so you cannot run away when you started (example, you jump over 1m wide gap in a cave meet a golem, find out you are no match for it, and you just cannot jump back). So it ends you die 100 times re load and maybe with a bit of luck you can kill that. I would preffer not to die at all and solve it somehow smart. Or the fact you can drink potions only in meditation mode so far far from the combat, along with the fact that mighty Geralt can be stopped by a shrub filled me sometimes with desperation. All together it is a good game, with great locations (I loved Vergen and surroundings), and some quests and characters are good. But still compared to W1 characters feels a bit more blunt and for same strange reason most of drinkers drink vodka :-)