![]() Geralt, on the other hand, has all the dexterity, responsiveness, and agility of an inebriated elephant. The problem is, Arkham Asylum masterfully captured the feeling of being the Dark Knight, who could smoothly flow from one attack to the next and strike multiple opponents at once. ![]() While Mass Effect 2 brazenly ripped off Gears of War, The Witcher 2 is clearly aiming for combat reminiscent of Batman: Arkham Asylum. The combat reminds me of Mass Effect 2 in that I can instantly tell what game the developers are ripping off. This isn't a PC game, this a console game with PC graphics. ![]() If anyone is considering purchasing the game thinking it's going to be a CRPG in the vein of classics of the genre, such as Fallout, Baldur's Gate, or Planescape: Torment, then you're going to be disappointed. The gameplay, to be brutally honest, is awful. Evil scale.īut when the introductory cutscenes come to an end and the rubber meets the road, The Witcher 2 stumbles badly. There is no asinine "morality meter" in The Witcher 2 - judgement of your decisions comes with the consequences, not with a number on a Good VS. And unlike a typical BioWare or Bethesda game, the choices offered to the player do not fall squarely into "good" versus "evil " instead they tends towards choosing whatever the player feels is the lesser of two evils. The developers made a clear effort to show the consequences of choices of your actions, and sometimes those consequences can be totally unexpected. To be fair to the game, there's some good things here. Geralt ends up taking the blame for the regicide, and the quest to clear his name and discover the identity of the real assassin is where the game begins. But during a siege of a castle belonging to a traitorous lord, Foltest is slain by a mysterious assassin, a hulking brute who speaks with a southern drawl and who might be a witcher himself. "I think the stick up my ass has a stick up its ass."Īssassins of Kings begins with Geralt in the service of King Foltest, a lecherous, foul-mouthed lout of a man who happened to father a daughter with his own sister (get used to these kinds of people, The Witcher is absolutely full of them). The Witcher games, naturally, place the player in the shoes of Geralt, whose entire personality can be predicted on account of his eternally constipated, po-faced expression. ![]() On account of their mutations, however, Witchers are seen by the people as being something other than human, and are viewed with disgust and revulsion in spite of the valuable role they play. Witchers are genetically-engineered mutants (as far as anything can be "genetically engineered" in a fantasy setting) bred for the sole purpose of slaying monsters. The Witcher was originally a series of fantasy novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski that revolve around Geralt of Rivia, the titular Witcher. That last point is something I want to bring up later, because the world of The Witcher is so vile, so thoroughly miserable, that any emotional investment I had in the story evaporated by the time I reached the first town in the game. What I got, however, was a strikingly mediocre Action-RPG that committed many of the same sins that modern RPGs commit: the sacrifice of RPG mechanics for twitch-based action elements, an over-reliance on story and cutscenes as a crutch to prop up weak gameplay, a horrendously clumsy interface, and an exceedingly juvenile attempt at being "mature" by drenching the game in gore, violence, sex, profanity, and general nastiness. We were promised a game that, unlike Dragon Age 2, would actually show the consequences of the choices our character made. Furthermore, it would be developed for the PC first, laying to rest any fears of the game suffering from consolitis. The Witcher 2 certainly seemed promising enough: it was developed by CD Projekt RED, an independent Polish developer who wouldn't have to bend knee to some clueless publisher like Electronic Arts. Hearing all the near-unanimous praise, I purchased The Witcher 2 for the same reason many did, I think - as an alternative to the wretchedly awful Dragon Age 2. No, not from the sycophantic gaming press (who will gush over anything, provided there's advertising revenue at stake), but from the fans, who will simply not shut up about its "brilliant" storytelling and the "mature" attitude the game takes towards the player. I can't recall a game that received more hype than The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.
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