The Witcher reviews

I agree with the previous reviewer,its a lot of years since a game has left such an impression on me also.....maybe its because I had no preconceived ideas of what it would be like…don't know This game is such good value for money length wise and has so many twists and turns,such interesting characters and creatures,that I spent a large part of my xmas holidays playing it. It is quite buggy,with a fair few crashes to desktop,but I found it soo engaging that I couldn't be put off by the bugs…which is very unusual for me. I had to vary the resolution and settings quite drastically through different parts of the game,but it still looked ok on some of the lower settings,the game world is very detailed and has a gritty,atmospheric feel to it. I'm not really a hard core RPG fan and couldn't see what the fuss was about with oblivion…but this one is something else!

Don't be put off by the negative reviews. This is easily my game-of-the-year. If you're expecting a directionless rpg like oblivion, then find another game. Most complain about not being able to outfit your character with fancy helmets + armor, and not being able to carry heaps of items… You play a very specific character, not one you create from scratch – Geralt is a monster-slayer, he is not a knight or merchant – and thats what makes this game so unique. It has a very solid identity – you play a well definied character with a strong history. The game-world is facinating and unique in its darkness, the story is absolutely fantastic, and the characters are wonderfully created with a lot of thought. Your actions actually have real effects throughout the game, to the point its easily worth another play-through after youve finished, to see how things could be different – the fighting mechanics are much more clever, enjoyable and much deeper than one would originally think, and so is the character-leveling and development. No, its not your usual braindead rpg, its a very unique experience. If your willing to give it a try and not give up after the first chapter, you'll be rewarded by one of the most enjoyable gaming-experiences youve had in a long time. I was ready to ignore this game when i first heard about it, focusing mainly on the ‘bigger’ games coming out… im glad i gave this game a shot, it leaves the others in the dust, and i cant wait for the sequel! I finished this game some time last week, and im still buzzed about it… no game in recent memory has left such an impression on me…

A stunning game.

The graphics are amazing – even on an older machine with a 3GHz Pentium 4 and a Radeon 4600 in an AGP port they run full bore with hardly a twitch, putting you firmly in a High Medieval, Central European world with a wealth of detail and almost photographic realism. Fire and water are amazingly realistic and the slow colour changes across the landscape that accompany sunrise and sunset are breathtaking.

It's an adult world, too, not a Disney saccharine fantasy of Olden Days. Rats are everywhere, beggars curse (colourfully) and spit, harlots offer themselves, and complain about their aches, women are cheerfully randy or uptight or somewhere in between (and can sometimes be seduced into bed), everyone whinges and gripes and in a predominately human society non-human races (dwarves and elves etc.) are treated somewhat like Jews in early '30s Germany, apt to be set upon by red-necks if not turned on by the community as a whole.

Combat is simplified yet, in the over-the-shoulder mode, surprisingly satisfying. Dodging and parrying can be left to the protagonist as a matter of instinct, as it is in any master swordsman, and your only involvement is to decide which of a number of distinct ‘attacks’ to use against the particular opponent and, crucially, when to initiate them. Getting both right and you can watch your avatar execute a smooth, unstoppable and damaging attack. Get either wrong and you might to hurriedly withdraw, hurt, to re-think and try again.

Magic, too, is simplified – no having to choose between thirty or forty spells in your arsenal. There are only five magic based attacks and, again, the skill is in choosing the right one and initiating it at the same time.

The Witcher's inno­vation is in Alchemy. By discovering the formulas for various potions, searching out the required ingredients and making them up one's abilities can be greatly enhanced. You can even experiment by concocting and trying our your own formulas, perhaps to hit on that elusive ‘total invulnerability’ result.

Aimed at adults, the game offers choices which need maturity to appreciate. Few are clearly right or wrong and all have consequences. This, too, effects a ‘real-world’ approach and is a welcome improvement over the “good” or “evil” simplicity of other games.

NOTE: This version is cheap because a updated – Enhanced – version has been released. This includes several major patches, extra content and a complete replacement of the vocal acting which in this version was much criticised. The enhanced content is available as a free 3GB download and can be installed on this version, giving you The Witcher – Enhanced version for this price, which is a very good deal indeed.

Definitely on par with Oblivion. The storyline is very well told and engaging. The graphics are stunningly beautiful (on a Win XP with GeForce 8600GT, 2GB RAM, and Pentium 4) and the combat system is excellent.

Visually it's great, but you knew that. The down side to this is it needs the computer from a Galaxy class starship to run it well. On my system of a 7800GTX, and an Athlon 4600+ I get mediocre performance on Medium setting outdoors, but I can live with it. The long save and load times get tiresome though.

I don't like the coloured rings around characters feat.

My biggest gripe is the lack of weapons and armour, and that you can't customise your character. He's certainly cool, but I would like options. Maybe a female version of the hero, or be able to change his appearance a bit, or different clothing and armour. Or instead of the Witcher two handed sword the option to use dual short blades, or a bow or something… anything to customise him a bit. You're basically stuck with the big sword because you can only use your Withcer fighting styles with it. So although you can use other weapons there's no point, which takes the fun out of finding new weapons (because there's no point using them) and perusing merchant's wares. There's not much really to spend your money on.

The main strength of the game is in the story and interacting with characters, doing quests and stuff. But none of that really gripped me.

I will say there's some beautiful artwork and music, and the design is good. Wandering the streets of Vizima's a real feast for the eyes. And not to mention all the comely wenches.

So it's worth a look if you've got a good rig, but as an RPG it's pretty basic.

Oh, and the nudity that caused such a fuss is actually only these portrait trophy cards that you get when you bed a wench, that are sometimes bare breasted.

I love this game. I am very fussy so me recommending a game is rare, but I do with The Witcher. The graphics are stunning and the video sequences are cohesive and engaging. The game play is point and click mostly, with a few quick keys for easier access to certain weapons, maps, inventory, etc. I really like the fighting options, depending on which difficulty level, there are spells, potions, weapons, fighting styles and weapon upgrades which all go into a really good fight with varied, interesting and increasingly bigger and uglier monsters. The story is awesome, one of the best story lines I've ever played. The characters in the story are woven in, the RPG and choice affects character development sucks you in completely to this world. The world in which these characters all interact is extensive and interesting. There are also side quests and the little interesting things to find which make this a very play over again game. Only one tiny little fault is the first version release crashes periodically, a pain if you've just spent 15 mins getting thru a fight sequence and area, but there are plenty of patches online to fix this. Overall brilliant, which is not said lightly

One thing I really like is you couldn't accuse it of being dumbed down. Or hacknslash. If you're like me and get tired of games that are clearly aimed at the teenage console player then this will come as a pleasant change. The quests and story are complicated and there's a lot going on. So much so I sometimes have trouble keeping track of everything, even with the journal.

You can go for ages without killing anything. If you're twelve years old or have ADD and can't go five minutes without fighting you'll hate this game.

A minor annoyance is the limited inventory. It quickly gets filled up, and you can't stash stuff in chests. You can ask an innkeeper to hold things for you, but the trouble there is he just might end up getting killed and you lose all your stuff. What would have been handy is a ingredient pouch or something like that, that you could put all your dozens of alchemy ingredients in without taking up so much space.

I hope this game does well because I would like to see more games like it aimed at grownups.

I actually played this game after I finished Dragon Age origins and expansion.

Being honest, because I played those game prior to playing this, I actually kinda felt ‘Mmm … Its okay : /’

Sorry to all Witcher fans, I know I made a negative comment about it but Witcher was released prior to DA:O and thus, it may not be as great. But the complexity of the story is far most amazing RPG I've ever game across. Most RPG games lack story and also how complex the character interaction can become, one character met here and finish quest, most game would send them away. But witcher is different, as it compels the players to find out more.

However, once frustration was its user interface and also how all these skills, magic, perks, abilities etc worked out. Very basic tutorial and annoying bugs. Running around is detrimentally frustrating, you cant run smoothly and fast as you are able to in most RPG games. Sometimes the windows clutters as you move, sometimes you get stuck with one directional view, sometimes it just doesn't move. And yes, this was after the big patches were installed. I just hope I DIDN'T install it properly and wish I am VERY wrong too.

Well Witcher, by research, showed that it DID have many bugs when it was released and during the past years CDPROJEKT sure did a lot of things to make it right. They even released the ‘Enhanced’ edition so players would NOT need to download each patch and install them (..I did..)

Anyways, graphics – Texture would of been considered great back then, but nowadays its high-med settings on DA:O. PC friendly though, my laptop can run it too.

Long long hours of quests and dialogues. Awesome in that context. Story is compellingly great, and music that haunts the environments is great too.

Combat although is quite different, having 3 main weapons for 3 different category or family of enemies. And you have ‘combos’ while you fight, so its not ‘click attack and see what happens’ its more of a ‘click attack and click more’ to get final results. Somehow, it keeps you on your toes as you can manually dodge by doing break falls too.

Awesome game, but frustration here and there. Now, its too cheap to make this game look even better than before. Try it before you go onto Witchers 2 … It makes HELL of a sense if you do … Unlike me, I played first chapter of W1 and then thought I can go for W2 … No no no , not good. Don't do that, it kills the whole trilogy.

:) have fun.

I have purchased this game as a gift for my son for Christmas simply because of the reviews that have already been submitted. I feel confident that it's going to be just right for him and he is going to thoroughly enjoy it.

I admit to being wary when I bought this since I'd never heard of CD Projekt Red and I wasn't sure if a game that is a couple of years old would play nicely with my Windows 7 64-bit PC.

I needn't have worried! After patching, The Witcher loads fast and runs well with no performance issues. Out of the box, I did hit some bugs – they didn't stop gameplay but were annoying.

The game uses a heavily modified version of the Aurora Engine by BioWare, enhanced for a single-player experience. If you are familiar with Aurora you will be blown away with what CD Projekt has done with it. There are, however, a couple of issues worth noting.

The Witcher benefits greatly from the updates that are available for it. The upgrade to the Enhanced Edition is free or you may also want to apply the Director's Cut update. The version we get here in NZ is the US version, which was censored. The Witcher is a game for adults and contains adult content – the US version censors this. Applying the Director's Cut essentially gives the same Witcher Enhanced Edition that the rest of the world gets. I had a couple of glitches when I first ran The Witcher as is, without patches. After patching up to the Director's Cut it has performed brilliantly.

This is a classic RPG with everything you would expect from a top game. Visually stunning with very good combat mechanics and a well-developed storyline, this is a game that RPG fans really should have in their collection.

This game can get a bit slow in places, and you have to trudge over the same ground but ulitmately it is worth it.

As a hero you are well developed and the experience is quite different than most RPGs

Given the price I would say it is a must for all RPG gamers

The witcher is a good rpg with a fantastic story-line with graphics to match. The witcher is set in medieval time, you play as a character known as Gerolt. The aim of the game is to walk around killing anything that looks at you funny and talk to some other random people to start many of the secondary missions. The Witcher is enjoyable but not very challenging, roughly a 10–12 in game hours. I would recommend reading the manual on how to play the witcher before starting as it makes the game more enjoyable knowing the backround story.

This is an amazing game and well worth playing. One thing I must suggest is there is a free online download to upgrade The Witcher to The Witcher enhanced edition. This updates the dialog and fixes many incomplete phrases in the game that could cause issues in the story line and a must do to make this game really enjoyable just search The Witcher enhanced upgrade to download it.

The Witcher has got to be the best game i have played in the year that is 2009 or actually, ever. In fact this is my first RPG…

I'm an FPS player at heart, I normally play games like Counterstrike, HL2, BF2, CoD4, Halo, Stalker series. So i started searching for something different to play for a change – an RPG game that has real time combat, which is difficult in this genre most being turn based, and of course decent graphics.. these are what initially sold it for me. Not to mention I was even more surprised at the in depth story, pleasant music and game play features such as using alchemy creating your own potions to enhance your abilities and the awesome sword movements – which were created using motion capture technology. Interaction is all voiced and I opted to download the Enhanced Edition patch (which is free) improving alot of the game especially the voice acting, and includes additional adventures.

In the way of problems, this game did crash a few times so do expect that and save often..but in saying this, the story being so great it kept me coming back for more.

The Quests are many and usually require problem solving or just talking to the right people. You could go about completing quests in different ways and decisions that you make within the game affect how the game flows and ends, so its not linear in that respect. I feel like Ive missed some things because of this but this is good in the way of re-playability and its definitely worth playing over again.

Well done cdprojekt! Waiting patiently for The Witcher 2!

The Witcher is certainly a good-looking game and has an interesting story to it. The combat takes a little getting used to, but is easy enough once one does.

Unfortunately, the game does crash rather often. Installing the required update seems to have made no difference there.

Where sex scenes are concerned, the scenes concerned may be thought of as such in the same way that a rabbit may be thought of as being a danger to cars.