The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition

I somehow missed the original Witcher upon release and did not play Witcher EE until early 2011. I was exceptionally amazed at what I had overlooked. I don't need opinions or reviews. I support CD Projekt Red and know the best way to show it. Downloading now.

The game suffers from two tremendous flaws. First, it assumes the player is familiar with th esetting and played the previous game. Characters, names and events are getting dropped left and right, and the game assumes the player is already familiar with them. The journal is only of limited help dispelling the convoluted mess of people and agendas. Without prior knowledge of the books and previous game, the story quickly becomes a jumbled, disinteresting mess. Secondly, the combat - the gameplay that makes up about 70% of the time you'll spend in this game - is shit. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. The animations are awkward. The controls feel disconnected from the characters action. The aiming is atrocious. The fights are all samey waves of enemies bumrushing you and trying to surround you. To add insult to injury, the Axii and Quen signs are hilariously broken. You will be able to finish every fight in the first half of the game on hard simply by castign quen and mashing either mouse button. So long asyou remember to reapply quen when it times you, you are effectively immortal. The final insult arrives when you realize that the fight in the monestary in the prologue is going to be the hardest fight in the entire game. Shortly after you unlock 360 degree parries with 100% damage reduction. And from then on, things only get easier. It is a crying shame, because the game certainly had a lot of potential. If they had someone who was not already intricately familiar with the setting proofread the plot for them and took time to make a combat engine worth playing, the game may actually have been a GOTY contender. What we do have is a jumbled, fragmented mess. People who are already invested in the setting are probably going to find something in there to make it all worthwhile. But if you are new to the franchise, do yourself a favour and grab another game instead. This will not be the title to win you over.

While the game is truly beautiful, it has suffered numerous bugs that have hampered even negated gameplay. Normally I'd have shelved this title because of the bugs, but the story and artwork are nice, I hope they release more content because 3 chapters seems a little on the light side for the cost at release. Even with the 16 different endings, that's pushing replay a little far for me personally, but I'm sure others wished there were more. All in all the game is worth a look, and if the bugs get fixed I'd definitely add a star even though it's short, the game can be fun, and frustrating at the same time. WARNING: This game is not for the easily offended, and it can be brutal on low to mid level gaming rigs.

The Witcher 1 EE was great. I recently purchased it on Steam and played through it once. I am planning on playng it again soon. I, also recently, purchased The Witcher 2 hoping it would be awesome too. But to my total surprise two of the camera angles had been removed: the low isometric and the high isometric. I used both of these angles out of combat and in combat and moved around by clicking. It felt exactly like Skyrim's interface, bleck. And the mouse button changed when switching from meus to the game world. I have searched all the mods and there are none that can fix this for me. My carpeltunnel kicks in with the hands' pain in many computer games so I have to do searches and research while not aggravating this condition. The Witcher 1 is very playable for me. I wish I could write a better review, but I can not. Steam has refunded my money very generously. I am very happy with Witcher 1 EE so I thank the game designers; I also sent them an email about this; it would be totally awesome if they could make a patch for it, but I know they are probably too busy and if few people want it then financially they won't care. Everyone says how good they are so I was hoping they might put out this extra effort.

The Witcher 2 was my most anticipated game since october 2007, when I first finished Witcher 1 (not Enhanced, but in version 1.1, without any problems or large bugs). So when it came out, I immediately downloaded gog version (with CE on its way) and started playing May 17th. 6 days and some 45 ingame hours later, I finished the game. Now it has been two months and I still find myself checking these forums every day, thinking about the game every day, and watching its 3 utterly brilliant trailers (disdain and fear, hope, love and blood) every few days or so. I just cannot believe how good the game is. Please note that I had only 1 insignificant bug, I have 16:10 screen and small black bars mean nothing to me, and I had flawless, crash-free experience.I played on ultra details (1920*1200, uber off) with x360pad. So I am judging purely the game itself, since I did not and do not have any technical issues. Everything - from graphics, where its combination of artistic vision and technical superiority makes it best looking game I have ever played (and yes, I played other stunners like Uncharted 2, Crysis 1+2, Metro, Red Dead Redemption..), to gameplay itself, with extremely done quests without any filler, very fun combat that requires being careful, being prepared... to writing, which surprised me the most. In Witcher 1, there was some good writing in it, and some worse writing. I love the game to bits, but it was not completely on the level of books that preceded it (I read all 7 of them, first time 12 years ago, second time year ago, love them). Witcher 2 though....it is written so well it could have been written by Sapkowski himself. It just blew me away. Every single character is interesting. There are no caricatures. Story itself is just wonderfully done, and there are even two completely different paths to go through it, with many smaller decisions and consequences along the way. I played Iorveth's path only so far (will replay with Roche once 1.3 is out) and it was just incredible. It is just amazing continuation of books, and I hope if Sapkowski ever decides to write about Geralt again, he will not invalidate the stories of the games. Because if he does, I guess I would just ignore his next books, or take them as non-canon. Witcher 2 just seems so much above its competition. I want to thank the team at CDP for giving me such an amazing experiences. Everything they do, from awesome distribution of games in central europe, to forming GOG, to bringing Geralt to our screens in such amazing form...just thank you. I hope you will never change, never get bought, keep your current team (I hope Tomek wil return one day too) and keep creating games like Witcher 2 for us. My 2 cents are finished.