The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition

Really good game, great climate, fun quests and dialogues, I enjoyed every minute playing it

You sort of need the Witcher world backstory (i.e. novels) to get the most out of this.

The combat is utterly awful, sluggish, inbalanced enemies that can kill you with 2 hits, blocking, dodging, nothing feels right in this game. Only thing acceptable in this game is Zoltans beard.

The battle system is bland. The Witcher may have been a clicking simulator to some, but it was still better than this. The dialogue is a load of Mass Effect/Dragon Age-like toss. In The Withcher, you chose what the character said. Here, you click a 2-word phrase, and the character goes off on a tangent spanning several sentences. But the best part is, you can't drink potions in battles. That's kind of their purpose? Instead of hitting the hotkey assigned to a potion you have to be out of battle, use the quick select wheel to choose "meditate", then click "drink potion", then choose up to 3 potions, then wish you had the physical copy to snap the dvd. The only improvement I am able to detect is that now your inventory is limited by carrying capacity, not the number of items you carry. Still, having a limited inventory is the recipe for extremely dull times, so the best way to improve it would've been to get rid of the limit altogether.

Witcher 2 is worth playing for the story experience alone - it's the high point of the game. In my opinion the main quest here is better than the main quest in TW3, with greater replayability due to the fork that occurs at the end of the first act. The world feels hand crafted, the lack of an interactive map leaves you to figure out quests for yourself using context clues in dialogue and quest text (I prefer this), and most of the characters you meet are interesting and well voiced. Alchemy in this game is unique in the series, as you're required to drink potions ahead of time in a meditation menu screen - this forces you to plan ahead for what you might encounter, which is good in that it feels rewarding when you get it right but bad on a first playthrough when you don't necessarily know what to expect from upcoming encounters, if you even know those encounters are coming. The combat is the weakest point in the game. It's a first attempt at an action-adventure hack and slash combat system that was improved upon in Witcher 3, but here it's slow and cumbersome and suffers from serious hit detection issues, where your damage hitbox is more dependent on camera angle than your sword's physical location. There are mods that attempt to fix and improve the combat system, but it never comes close to Witcher 3's combat, which itself is less than excellent in my opinion. I would recommend this game to anyone as a full price purchase if you like The Witcher or dark fantasy in general.