It's 2019, and in many respects, The Witcher has not aged well. The face models and 3D renders have aged woefully, yet the art direction and texture work remains surprisingly strong. The controls are unresponsive at times and moving Geralt around Vizima and its surrounding environs can be a frustrating chore. The voice acting is poor and at times unintentionally funny. And the combat, the primary means of interacting with this world, is dated. Players make Geralt fight by participating in a ryhthm game of timing swings of swords, lest no attack happen at all. The game struggles to run on modern systems at time, often crashing when there are too many models on screen or while loading new areas. Save often. And yet despite all this I enjoyed the game immensely, save for Act V and the Epilogue. The Witcher was the freshman game from CD Projekt Red, and it's clear that they both weren't sure how to develop a video game but tried desperately hard. The game is dripping with a delightful yet bleak Slavic atmosphere. The game has taken on a quaint charm due to how poorly some of it has aged. The story is one of the weaker elements on display here. It's essentially a revenge plot that drags on too long. Yet there are fun and engaging side stories to discover and good characters to form relationships with. I appreciated how small the story begins, how it grows in scope dramatically and finishes in a quiet courtyard, with a solid prerendered cinematic at the very end to set up the sequel. The ending isn't a boss rush exactly, but the game does through an obscene number of enemies at you for the last hour or so, and it became tiring quickly. If you haven't played any of the Witcher games before, I wouldn't start here unless you crave the full context of the story, but I think it's more enjoyable to go back later to learn where Wild Hunt came from.
I didn't play 'Assassins of Kings' for the first time until recently, well after I'd played through all of 'Wild Hunt' and its two expansions many times over. After my first playthrough of 'Kings' I feel confident there will be a second. First off, the game's graphics and art direction hold up in 2018, and provided you have at least a mid-tier gaming rig such as mine, you can max out this game's visuals and enjoy a real treat. The story of 'Kings,' however, is less resiliant. Truly, it is less a story and more a collection of events loosly connected by Geralt's desire to find the man who killed King Foltest. Depending on a major player choice, the middle section of the game is set in one of two locations completely independent from one another. This is super neat, but ultimately feels too scripted. As a witcher, Geralt spends much his adventure swinging swords, and I almost wish he didn't. Combat in 'Kings' is often difficult for the wrong reasons. Geralt swings his sword in whichever direction the camera is facing, and there's no means of properly locking on to enemies, only a means of forcing Geralt to swing in a specific direction. This, coupled with wonky and sometimes broken hit detection, can create some infuriating enemy encounters, Additionally, combat can be enhanced with Signs, bombs, traps, throwing knives, blade oils, and potions, but most of the time you're best off just to keep swinging. All of the aforementioned enhancements just take too long to use, mostly because of difficult to navigate pause menus that were expressly designed with consoles in mind. And at times, there are out-of-place stealth sections and outdated button promps/QTEs. 'Assassins of Kings' is amalgam of many ideas and components that don't always harmonize, but I found it to be loads more enjoyable than many RPGs released in recent years (except this game's successor). If you've only played 'Wild Hunt,' I recommend going on a fresh adventure with Geralt and his pals.
