Right out of the gates, you're thrown into an epic battle against demon hordes. The first real break in the story involves a dungeon full of demons that is nearly impossible to defeat without using story mode, thanks to their significant resistances and the fact that you haven't leveled nearly enough to have abilities to do damage to them.
This game could maybe be decent, but it makes some rather egregious mistakes that most of the industry has learned to avoid: 1. You should always be able to leave a cutscene, especially one in which you have dialog options, by hitting the escape key. You can get stuck hitting spacebar for 20 minutes (and spoiling things for yourself on the way) if you accidentally complete a mission before you meant to. You can't hit escape and get back to the load screen to reload. This is especially egregious in save-skimming sections where you really want to try to get past something but keep failing, and there's a long cutscene afterwards. Maybe they intended that as a way to force you to accept defeat, but for me, it's a way to force me to uninstall the game. 2. The game should only have X number of autosave slots. If you play through the full game, you will be sitting on hundreds of save files taking up many gigs of space. This might not be a problem for some people, but especially on GOG, where you only have 1gb of cloud storage, it quickly eats up all of it. 3. The crossbow feels like a complete afterthought. In water it's functionally a one-shot kill, but anywhere else it's completely useless - and much worse than useless, it's also hard to use. Very often I would find myself hitting the button to aim the crossbow, only for that to instead randomly be the trigger to fire this time, or to just sit there and look stupid another. 4. Severing animations are kinda fun the first time you perform them, but you'll be performing them thousands of times over the course of the game, and for most of that, they're just annoying. Nevermind the fact that the story is completely unbelievable. In previous iterations, they covered for bad writing by making Geralt "emotionless" - but other Witchers clearly have emotion and often express those emotions vividly. It's impossible to feel anything for Geralt as a result.
