The Witcher: Enhanced Edition

I am in 2nd chapter and I am loving this game... Game crashed, again... F this game. If id doesn´t crash for you, make it 4,5/5

CD PROJECT RED YOU ARE THE BEST!!!!!! LOVE YOU ALL Believe we will see many of your games in future and they all will be perfect like you

There's too much to fully discuss in a short review, but... Pros: The Witcher has a great level of detail in the environments, dialogue and lore. This is a world with a complex history, much of which is implied or gleaned from books within the game. Virtually every character, monster or item has a journal entry that gives a little more detail and, appropriately for a game based on a book, it rewards those who take the time to read. The plot is interesting and gives you some hard choices to make. There are lots of sidequests. The dialogue is well-written and most characters have their own motivations and backgrounds, rarely feeling like generic NPCs. The item/alchemy system is diverse and interesting. There are dozens of items to collect and lots of different potions, all of which are useful against certain enemies or in particular situation. You can learn how to brew potions through recipes or just by experimenting, allowing resourceful players to gain an advantage early. Using the potions wisely can prepare you for a difficult fight. Cons: I'm not sure if it's also a problem with the source material, but the game is pretty sexist- while it occasionally pays lip service to women, especially sorceresses, being powerful and influential, most of the women in the game are fairly vapid and shallow, and seem to exist only to be easy lays for Geralt- after which he usually never interacts with them again. The medieval setting might partially excuse this, but still- collectable sex cards? Really? The combat system is a little boring. It consists of timed clicks to attack and an occasional spell, and the only thing that keeps every battle from being identical are the potions you can drink and the gradual upgrades to your attacks as you level up. The many sidequests can slow down the pace of the game, but you'll need them for the XP they give. Limited inventory space makes it difficult to use your potions strategically without many long, tedious trips to the inn.

This game has a serious pacing issue. I actually really liked the first 3-4 hours of the game, then quickly got bored doing redundant errands around town, and the story just wasn't progressing. I found the story really boring. It's a very basic "Mysterious wizard stole your ancient secrets, go kill him." It throws a few intricacies in there and tries to throw in politics to give your decisions more weight. The only problem is, this gives you a choice of picking between one of 2 groups of... well, let's just call them racists that hate each other. It continually reminds you that you can't straddle the fence or you'll make one side or both very angry, which in the end, they both basically turn out evil, and hate you. Which would be a spoiler, except it's really obvious. The main characters you actually spend time with are fine, (Dandelion, Triss, Thaler, Zoltan... has his moments) but almost every other minor character you just don't care about, and I'm using the term minor very loosely. The voice acting is at best bad, and at worst god awful atrocious... I never want to hear Zoltan Vraggroaaaaarrr again. The VA's are basically just reading scripts. It's not a huge issue, but WOW are some of them bad. The locations vary, which I suppose is a good thing.... but none of them were particularly intriguing to me. I found myself just trying to finish the sections as quickly as possible so I could move on to the next location, which ended up being a very dull drab hard to navigate swamp. The combat was equally as boring as the story, with 3 sword styles for each blade type and a weird rhythm game where you click once the animations finished to do a combo. Basically, you use the group style, run into a mob of enemy's and click once every so often. You might ask why I played through this, and I'm genuinely interested in the Witcher world, as I played through 3 first and it's a brilliant game. When I mentioned to my coworkers that I actually beat this game, they consoled me.

"My balls itch." 8/10 - Would scratch again. Played for the first time in 2020.