The Witcher: Enhanced Edition

The Verdict: A unique, excellent RPG with fun real-time combat, a great story and setting and wonderful music. Should be in any RPG and action gamers' collections. The Good: Unique, immersive storyline and setting with the ability to make choices. Fun combat, cool monsters, beautiful music and good voice acting. Alchemy is fun, and crucial on harder difficulty levels, adding a new level of strategy to combat. The Bad: Why even have knives and axes other than to look cool hanging on your character? Some glitchy combat. Too many drowners (but you can get a talisman to repel them if you are sick of fighting them). Possible to break some quests or do them out of order. The Long: The story and setting in the Witcher are so unique and good that they alone make it a great RPG. But the choices available to you and the huge number of side quests make it even better. The combat is fun, although I don't know why they even bothered putting weapons other than swords in the game. And some of the quests require some pointless backtracking. But those are minor annoyances in a great game. The setting, characters, music and storyline are so memorable that I found myself totally immersed in the world and felt like I was playing a really good book. And the freedom to make whatever choices you want, without being tied into a cliched "light or dark" choice path, really immersed me in the game. I made choices because I wanted to on a case-by-case situation, not because I wanted to get more dark side points or something. And the way they affect the game world was interesting to see. I bought the original edition on a whim, because it looked different. I loved it so much I bought the digital version here so I can have the fully-patched up director's cut in one easy to use file. Plus it's so good I wanted to support the developers one more time. For $5 or $10 you'd be hard pressed to find a better deal for one of the best RPGs ever made.

I mainly play action games and 1st person shooters but this game always looked cool to me and have always heard gr8 things about it so I decided to spend the $4.99 and jump in. I absolutely was hating it for the 1st 30 minutes. I just couldn't grasp the combat system...seemed to be just button mashing and hope for the best. I didn't read the manual so maybe that would have helped? All of a sudden while in combat I had a eureka moment and I understood how it worked...choose a combat style...time your strikes...dodge/parry. From then on I was kicking rear end. I'm loving this game now! I like the menu interface, the graphics are fantastic...no need to use any texture mod. I will definately being getting the Witcher 2 when I'm finished with this.

Although this game is praised by so many people, I never could get into it. The story starts very slow and isn't interesting at all to the point I played (around 5 to 6 hours). The combat system is bland and not at all challenging, character developement (gameplay wise) doesn't really matter and the side quests are your typical kill x things, gather x things etc. Add to that a not very immersive atmosphere and you got a generic "dark" fantasy rpg. Not my cup of tea.

Even with some drawbacks which might set a possible rating a few pegs back, or many some would argue, I am personally grateful that in our array of RPGs, the Witcher is able to stand head and shoulders above many modern RPGs including the likes of Mass Effect, Skyrim, Dark Souls and horrible iterations of FF 13. It's strong points far outweigh any kind of negative aspects you could find in a game like this, the dated graphical quality, the roughened edges of a few gameplay aspects and mechanics. The Witcher hooks you into the world it is eager to present through one main focus: complex and thoughtful writing that in my opinion underpins everything, from the script, to the choices, to the twists and turns of the story and the display of lore that appears in bountiful cartloads. The combat may be offputting for some but I deeply enjoyed the various degrees of elaborate techniques, skills, and items that give life to an elegant and refined approach to fighting. Another thing for which I'm grateful for is the Witchers way of dealing with touchy, difficult and often grave subjects. I believe that it truly has captured a suitable way of making the player deal with these situations in a mature and thoughtful mindset. Expect the Witcher to draw you into a rich and lively world that you will gladly explore and revisit.

... and are still wrong whatever you do. :-) Excellent combat, outstanding story, great alchemy system - yes, the game has that. But what blew me away when I played it were the choices you make during the dark and sinister story: these make the game a very mature one, in the sense that there is no "black and white". Often, when you come to make a choice, you choose between bad and worse. You can pretend to be the gallant knight in shining armor, but what good does it do when faced with the choice to save a murderer or let other murderers kill him to get away with their evil deeds? All that is presented with polished and detailed graphics that really add to the atmosphere. The technical aspects make the game good, but the moral aspects make it shine.