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.
