Although obviously going for a Windwaker-vibe, the game does not in fact deliver anything close to it. Crafting is a necessary and boring part of the game (you have to scroll through a list and hold a button to build something). Combat is also boring and lacks any feeling, like the rest of the game it feels a bit 'floaty'. The physics engine the game uses shares the same feeling/issue which makes everything including moving around just feel slightly dull and annoying. The world is extremely minimalistic and small. There aren't many different enemies and not many enemies in general. And the boss battles are unimaginative and occasionally consist of very slowly chipping away at a huge lifebar. This is made even more fun by the fact that your weapons break and you have to craft replacements. Controlling the game with a controller is possible, but you do need to move a cursor over objects to interact with them so M+KB might be an easier way to play. Having to move the camera around to pick up a small sword in the middle of a battle is not a lot of fun. Like WindWaker you'll have to travel between islands, which in this game is once again not a lot of fun. The distances between the islands have been filled with debris which slows you down and poison mines that slowly kill you. That combined with the fact that your boat doesn't stay on course means you can't just point your boat in the right direction and let go. They probably realised this themselves which is why you can fast travel to an island after having visited it once. There is also a loading freeze when the game moves you from the world map to the island instance (on SSD). All in all it's not a terrible game.. but it is pretty empty, dull and not particularly well-made. It's almost like a demo for an engine.
The game consists of four 'episodes' which should take you about 30 minutes to complete and if I remember correctly every episode uses a 'scary walk through a haunted house' sequence. That combined with the very simple puzzles means that there really isn't all that much gameplay, all the gameplay basically boils down to going back to a room you've been to to use an item you got in a new room in order to open the door to yet another new room. Graphically.. well you've seen the screenshots, it's not great. It's barely functional. There are good looking games with 'pixel art', this is not one of them IMO. The music in the game is decent and sets the mood for the 'Lovecraftian' story. A few points that might be interesting: I don't think you can die in the game, the story is not complete and the developer is working on the next expisodes, there is very little interactivity except for those things in the world you have to manipulate in order to advance the story and there is no manual saving. I also had a few Adobe Air crashes in the third episode, but since the game automatically saves your position in the episode this is not a huge deal. Although you will have to watch the unskippable logo movies again.
So the game itself is good, not great. It suffers from all the same things any open world RPG suffers from and some poor optimization. Any game this large will have its fair number of glitches and bugs and W3 is no exception. Graphically, the game is nice. If the engine could keep up the framerate consistently, it would be very nice. It still runs very acceptably, but spikes are noticeable and the settings make very little impact on the framerate. The next patch (1.07) is enormous so hopefully they''ll have smoothed out some of the issues. Story-wise the game is pretty good, with the side quests often having better stories than the actual main quest line. The Witcher world is very dark though, so don't expect any happy stories. The gameplay is pretty good as well, although the beginning is pretty unforgiving and unkind towards newer players. Nothing is very well explained either, making building a good character needlessly annoying. The extremely simple Gwent card game mini-game is fun to play and a nice diversion from the endless running/riding around you'll be doing. The horse mechanics are among the most annoying I've ever encountered and are about on par with those in Ocarina of Time which is about two decades older. Again, apparently there are several improvements to the horse in the next patch. Long story short, a good game with plenty of room for improvement.
