The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition

Witcher 1 was a beautiful game. Multiple playthroughs, so many branches. Easily have sunk 200 hours into it. 4.5 play throughs. Witcher 2 however, has.. been horrible. the storyline is shoehorned in many places, cutting you off from the variety of choices that where available in witcher 1. Difficulty is scaled poorly. Easy is too easy. Normal is,.. difficult. And many, many spots where you have no choice but to simply die and reload. Amnesia can only account for so much - you spent a large amount of time in witcher 1 getting yourself up to speed and learning. In witcher 2, you're back to being a weak rookie. The only moments of 'cool' are when a cutscene intervenes - not when you've just taken down somethign difficult yourself. An incredible dissapointment, almost dissapointing enough to demand my money and time played back. The witcher franchise is not Mass Effect. This was a woeful attempt to make Witcher 2 in the same manner as Mass Effect 2. Seneschul

I really enjoyed Witcher 1 and got a great deal here at GOG in buying W2EE. But this game is very frustrating. It has a horrid tendency to devolve to an arcade game where you have to execute exactly the moves they want in a long sequence that cannot be saved. This results in doing things over and over and over. And the slow long death animation means you have to wait a long time before you can even reload. Terrible design decisions on what is otherwise a really good game. Given the frustration will likely have me quit the game before finishing (already 20 attempts at the Kayran battle), I can only give it 2 stars.

THE GOOD: - graphics (for its time) - voice acting is superb - two branching paths - combat system improved (over THE WITCHER 1) - excellent story - superior Enhanced Edition that deserves its name (new content) - decisions with far reaching consequences - well-writen and believable characters - no simple "good vs. evil" story - branching skill tree - combat has tactical component with alchemy THE BAD: - lazy port from console/designed with consoles in mind (menues, controls) - Quick Time Events, especially in boss fights. - rushed third act - controls are wonky, input lag - stealth quests are poorly implemented - maze-like levels are not well designed BOTTOM LINE: A potentially great RPG ruined by Quick Time Events (QTE's should never be in any game. Ever. Especially not in an RPG!) and wonky controls that were designed with consoles in mind. Menues are a chore to navigate and Geralt's movements are imprecise and tank-like. This is especially frustrating since the game has a lot going for it: the story is fantastic and the characters are believable and well-writen. The is no black and white, something the series is known for and decisions have far-reaching consequences that don't allow for a quick reload. Alchemy is not just tacked on, in higher difficulties it is essential for survival, also there is no in-combat healing, so no spaming healing potions during a fight. Unfortunately boss fights are not fun at all, as they always are Quick Time Events. Do not recommend.

I was really enjoying the game at first until I got about half way through, then the game just falls apart. The quests get extremely repetitive and randomly scale up in difficulty. You can have a difficult game but don't just randomly throw the player into a cave full of 80 enemies and have all of them attack the player at once. Then there's the potion system.. Who thought this was a good idea? The game literally expects you to be able to see the future in order to use any of the potions properly. You have to drink various different types of potions BEFORE you enter a battle. How do you know a battles coming up? You don't. How do you know what type of enemy's your going to face? You don't. How you know what type of potion you should drink in order to properly deal with the enemy? You don't. I guess they expect you to save every five seconds and then reload your game once you know what's coming up next, which is complete bull. Then there's the ending. It was incredibly abrupt. I thought the game was just getting started and then all of the sudden the credits rolled. Without spoiling anything you get to an area that's completely unfinished, get an extremely overpowered set of armor for free and then just slaughter a ton of enemy's that where incredibly hard to kill only 10 minutes ago, kill one of the easiest boss's in the history of gaming and the credits roll. I don't even want to mention the consolized inventory or the quick time events.

After a long, careful consideration I'm firmly decided the second Witcher does deserve an absolute rating. Now I don't tend to hand out 10s as if there was no tomorrow, so believe that my point of view towards the game isn't just another temporary shout out of excitement of a young gamer who still wanders around in the state of euphoria. Rather, it's a steady verdict of a quite bored gamer, who's been, after many years, finally torn out of lethargy by this one game that managed to re-wake the passion for gaming inside him. Tomasz Gop once noted their game would be the synthesis of Demon's Souls, Heavy Rain and Arkham Asylum, and wow he was actually pretty accurate with that statement. But what's more important, it's not only these games, but the entire decade of the games' market. The best way to put it is that The Witcher 2 is a game which defines the current condition of the gaming industry. It's the centerpiece of everything the many companies were attempting to come anywhere near to before. You'll find just about everything in this game – from the intensive gameplay to the slowest „stalker"like; from the deep story digging in ethical questions to the sharp escalating twists; from the tactical battles all the way to those that seem as though they come from some one-on-one fighting game; and finally, from the interactive movie with QTE sequences to nearly classical adventure-ing. From the pointed aspects two things are apparent: 1) In a „dream world" The Witcher would be a game that would draw a thick line behind the current development, thus initiating its new generation. 2) The combination of mechanisms leads to a varied gaming experience. The second point is key for the gamers, since the game does NOT go as near as to the standard feeling of satisfaction found in other titles. It's the mixture of what at first seems to be an incongruous material that causes the quantum of „emotions" the game manages to evoke in you. It often goes far to the ancient times for a bit of inspiration, when the challenge meaning hardcore elements also meant some sort of a reward for the player, just as it does in the game (the anger and anxiety during the battle with Kayran -> the unbelievably satisfying and expurgatory feeling after his defeat). CDP RED were well aware of it, and so they prepared the Insane difficulty (simply put, death = game over); I think it would be virtually impossible to juice any more potential out of it. A sequel to an already perfect game merely prompts many and many other questions, for example how does the European market stand in relation to the one beyond the ocean, which I'll rather won't get into. But, I could simply say it's simply the greatest pleasure to play such detailed, all in all perfectly polished and playable RPG that combines various genre directions in a very skilled way. The script is a chapter of itself, but it's excellent in the core; the journey in the trails of the royal murderer is easily one of the finest pieces of writing I've ever seen in this given media. To conclude, I must praise the narrative experiment that no other game of heroes has had the guts to take (afaik) and which works (damn) well in here.