A word of preface before starting: this review was written from the point of view from someone who has played the 2 previous Witcher games just over a year ago, so while I am familiar with them, it was quite a while ago and my memory of them may no longer be crystal clear.
I got a massive feeling of Deja Vu when playing The Witcher 3. Much like Mass Effect 3 was almost mechanically identical to Mass Effect 2 but with a different story, The Witcher 3 is almost mechanically identical to The Witcher 2 but with a different story. With only small game-play adjustments, much of The Witcher 3 will feel very similar to anyone who has played The Witcher 2. There is also an enormous amount of lore which is not often explained or recapped, so those who do not remember much of the plot-lines or characters from before hand may often be left wondering “What the hell is going on?”
First of all, “The Good”:
The most satisfying part is once again the combat which despite some difficulties with clunky controls works very well and makes you feel like a bad-ass monster killing Witcher especially when you start to unlock some of the later very fancy skills.
There is a truly staggeringly huge amount of content in this game and will give tremendous re-playability and extra content to go through. It took me 30 hours for a fairly swift play-through of mostly just the main plot quests with a small amount of secondary quests. CD Projekt Red were probably not exaggerating when they claimed it would take 100 hours to completely do everything in the game.
It is also a stunningly beautiful game. I mean my god. You can just get lost just walking around and gawking at all the sights. The dynamic weather is also a fantastic addition allowing storms and blizzards and such to descend at any time. One particularly excellent example of this is in swampy areas when large wind and rainstorms appear and you can hear the wind howling and the trees swaying and creaking and the rain lashing down. It’s quite a sight to behold. It also made my GPU weep tears of pain as I desperately tried to push a stable 30-40 FPS out of it. With an overclocked Intel i7 3700K and overclocked GTX 670 I could only comfortably manage medium presets. But I mean just look at it.
Next up, “The Bad”:
Equipment degradation is one of the worst ideas in the history of gaming but sadly it was put into this game. So your weapons and armour will regularly reduce in effectiveness or break entirely so it is necessary to keep going back and forth and spending money (which is quite scarce in early stages) to get them repaired or else you will be totally neutered in fights. Yes, it’s more “realistic”, but it’s a terrible idea for a game and should die forever.
Because the world of The Witcher 3 is a huge open world, you need ways to get around it quickly. One of these ways is your horse, Roach. While this means of conveyance is faster than walking in theory, a lot of the times it is not. The horse can theoretically autopilot along marked roads but it rarely succeeds at this and will often just fly off the road into obstacles and get stuck. It also seemingly gets stuck on every twig and pebble even when manually controlled so quite often unless I had to travel a truly huge distance and had no other option, I would tend to favour just legging places on foot.
The game’s fast travel system is also almost total trash. You can only fast travel to map signs when you are standing beside another map sign. But the problem there is that quite often when a quest ends, you are left stranded in the middle of nowhere with none of these signs around for miles. One occasion I was left on a remote isolated island on one side of a mountain with the nearest sign being on the other side of the mountain so the only options were to either scale the mountain or go around it just to get back to civilization.
The controls also seem a lot clunkier than they were in the previous games somehow often causing various problems such as getting stuck on scenery, drowning and getting stuck on your horse while being cut to bits by an angry mob. I tried it both on keyboard + mouse and controller and controller seemed to be the more comfortable but still not without it’s difficulties. Swimming controls are especially difficult with trying to control things while diving underwater being damn near impossible.
And “The Other”:
The depth that the quests can sometimes get to is both simultaneously great and tiresome. While it’s good that the story has great depth to it, it can get a bit annoying after the seventh or eighth link in quest chain when you start out wanting to do something simple, but to do that, someone wants something else and to get that, you need help from someone else and to get help from that person you need another thing and on and on and on. It can feel like it takes an eternity to get even the simplest of things accomplished. This made the game feel incredibly slow at times and lacking in momentum.
I came across many less bosses in this game than I did in the previous two games. Which did tone down the epicness of the tale a little when there were not that many huge hulking obstacles in my way.
There were also many less difficult choices where it’s hard to make any kind of decision. In The Witcher 1 and 2 there were many many choices you had to make where it was very hard to tell what you should do and how this would have consequences down the line. Most choices seemed fairly cut and dry and easy to tell what would happen when you picked various options. That may have been due to the fact that this is the end of Geralt’s story and there were limited ways things could pan out, but it took away a bit of the bewilderment the previous games had. I made a concious effort to be a jerk throughout most of the game so I got what definitely felt to be “The bad ending”. From what I have read, there are at least 3 different main endings and minor variances within them depending on the choices you made.
Summary
The Witcher 3 overall feels like more of the same of The Witcher 2 with some of the rough game-play edges smoothed out and a few new rough ones exposed. There is less linearity than there was in previous games and shedloads more quests and activities to partake in. But sadly, a lot of the greyness and ambiguity in the world that made the previous games so interesting and tricky to completely figure out seems to have left too making it a bit more black and white and simplified.
It’s a no brainer if you played and enjoyed previous games. You just might find that it’s a little different this time round as the trilogy comes to a close.
And it’s also a no brainer if you haven’t played the previous games. It’s still an excellent action RPG. Just a little slow paced at times….
Final score: 4/5
Watch video footage of my play-through right here:
