The Witcher: Enhanced Edition

I played it when the witcher 2 was already out. I had heard wonderful things of both games but being a fan of the books I was reticent...Stupid of me!!! The witcher is an amazing start for the saga (the game saga I mean, though it still really loyal to the books. I recomend read them before playing so you enjoy all the easter eggs to the fullest). Though the grafics have grown old quite badly and the controls are a little stiff sometimes, the game is so awesome you don't even notice. (I like old games anyway so maybe I am biased) The story is well developed, the RPG is an istant classic, lots of stuff to play with. You just have to try it to understand the feeling.

Gotta say I was pleasantly surprised by the game. I hadn't read the books or played any of the games but finally gave this a shot when it came free with Gwent on here. I'm not sure how much the Enhanced Edition added to the original but the game is impressive considering it came out of a small studio adapting a fantasy series that wasn't even translated to English until 2007. The game definitely has a Bioware feel with the engine but I find with a few mods everything holds up and the voice acting quality is good as well. Things like the chapter based story/maps and fighting mechanics may seem a little quaint but in the time of fetch quests and huge empty open worlds the simplified inventory system is a breath of fresh air. The potion crafting has just enough complexity to stay interesting and you can set the difficulty levels to make potions more or less essential. The game probably got overshadowed due to games like Oblivion, Mass Effect, Bioshock, and Dragon Age coming out in the same three year span but that doesn't make it any less impressive.

I didn't like my experience with this game,. The story, the lore part, is indeed exceptional. But for me, it was the only bit worth playing this game. The mechanics were lousy, to put it mildly. I'll go through some of them that I may remember while writing this: Pros: - The story; - There’s replayability value if you’re patient enough. - I liked the crafting system. Both the idea and how it is applied. Cons: - Lack of weapons and armors. The entire game has only three armors and like four or five swords. There are more swords, but only four or five worth a nickel. Since there are two types of swords, it’s like five swords divided by two. And that's pretty much it; - The auxiliary weapons are worthless in Witcher 1, since your character can only do his moves, the witcher’s moves, with swords. I don’t know with the devs have put these weapons in the game; - The loot system is, for lack of better words, sad. You have to manually pick all the stuff that you want. Since it takes the same one to three seconds as the storage to appear the box that allows you to grab stuff, you can see that a good chunk of the game is just waiting these loading times, which are painfully frequent; - In the same manner, the game has two modes for the character to be in: normal mode and fighting mode. You can only interact with people, enter sub-location, or loot or do anything but fighting in normal mode. Problem is, Sometimes it takes a good amount of time waiting for the game to finalize the fighting mode. And that only if there isn’t a hiding enemy or an enemy that you simply don’t feel like fighting, and just want to go on with the story. It’s a patience test since it happens so damn frequently. There's more stuff I wrote, but unfortonetely, there's a letter limit for reviews here. Maybe there’s more good or bad things that I didn’t remember while writing this text. But if I knew how this would pass, I certainly wouldn’t have played this game.

The first installment actually surprises by how much it has to offer. The world is somewhat open, if not locked by story progress, the story itself is absorbing and character driven, dialogue is as brilliant as always. Graphics are fairly dated, though it doesn't really hurt that much. Music is great, not as intense as in other games but matches the pace of this one. A lot of people tend to shit on combat, but personally I enjoy it a lot. When you get through character progression a little, combat becomes very exciting IMHO. Would definitely recommend buying this game and seeing you like it, because you just might.

It's a great game and was amazing for it's time but looking back at it it feels outdated at times. Still more than worth the time of any RPG fan.