The Witcher: Enhanced Edition

The best of this game is that Witcher 2 and 3 follow. Playing this game means that you will be spending way too much time of your life just holding the W key. At least half, maybe more of the game, consists in travelling a path you have already travelled before at least ten times. This makes the the whole thing very repetitive and, to me, very boring. Travelling can be enjoyable if things to be discovered exist and events happen along the path. But going twenty times from A to B, and then back from B to A, with nothing new happening ever, makes me feel like an errand boy. Other than that: combat system was enjoyable and challenging at the beginning; then it became repetitive and too easy —even at highest difficulty. The story, I didn't find it too compelling, but not bad either, and I didn't find characters to be too charismatic. I wouldn't recommend playing it nowadays, unless you have a particular interest in playing all three Witcher games in order.

If you just finished playing The Witcher 3 and are itching for more, this is a definite must play. The story, characters, locations and lore are amazing and the progression of the story is very rewarding. Your choices matter and within the first couple of hours playing you will realize this as you make decisions that dictates who lives and who dies. When you pick up the game for the first time, the gameplay and combat are definitely going to be a bit hard at first but if there's a game you want to stick with until you get the hang of it, it's this one. If you enjoy story rich RPGs with memorable characters, deep lore, and a great story buy this game right now and get ready to get completely hooked by this world. A must play.

It's a highly atmospheric game

So, let's get this out of the way: I'm playing this natively on a Mac Mini 2, purchased in March 2023 and running MacOS 13 Ventura. There's a little glitch where the cursor disappears when the game first launches. You sort of have to fumble around until you highlight one of the splash screen commands (New Game, Load Game, etc...). Once that's going, the cursor reappears you're in and the game runs great. I got this for free from GOG like five years back, probably when The Witcher debuted on Netflix. As for the game itself? I'm playing this right as I'm finishing up The Witcher 3 on PS5, so as you can imagine, there's a little bit of whiplash, quality-wise. That said: Witcher One, if anything, shows how far CD Projekt Red has come. The graphics and characters are servicable at best. Again, this is a 17 year old game, but I kinda of feel like even for that time frame, there was much better out there. Another issue is the combat itself. I didn't quite get what was going in the tutorial. Someone on Reddit pointed out that if you approach this as a point-and-click adventure, it helps immensely. Basically, point at an enemy, left click, and then wait for a second for the game to do it's thing. It's weird, but once I did that, I started moving along. Now that I'm about 30 mintues in, I'm like "Okay, yeah, this story is making up for the techinical limitations." It really is fasciniating to play this and then see whate CDPR wound up a decade later. All of the elements that you interact with in W3 are here in almost embroynic form. I'm not sure if I'll finish this or not. This game has a rep for being janky and it's well deserved. I also just bought Witcher 2 and everything (UI, gameplay, art) is just light years beyond the first one. It's literally a much more enjoyable process. If you can get this cheap, it's worth getting just to experience a piece of gaming history, if nothing else.

This game gets a lot of very good reviews but not from me. I am sorry to say I didn't make it past the first part. After a video start you are in a castle where the sword trainers are discussing pirouettes and their usage. I am not an expert but I am sure their usage in sword fighting is a little less than never. Am I in a dancing class or a fighting class. Certainly not an acting class because he voice acting is, well, as bad as pirouetting during a sword fight. This is closely followed by my first taste of real combat where my character runs around like a lunatic holding his sword as high in air as he can whilst the screen tells me I am attacking too fast. How can I be too fast, they have no armour and I have a big sword. One hit should be enough. I missed this game first time round. Some people really like it. Maybe it gets a lot better later on but I don't think I am going to find out. I always wondered what I missed out on. From my couple of hours (yes, that is how long it took me to slice up a few unarmoured ruffians) I believe I missed out on shockingly bad voice acting, strange graphics choices and some really bad controls that just made it unplayable for me. I thought this would be akin to the elder scrolls but I just found it to be a dumbed down version.