[/caption]This is the fourteenth post in our Game of the Day series.
I've been watching Yahtzee's brilliant video reviews every week for over a year now and while they're almost universally critical of the game in question, sometimes the criticisms cause me to buy the game anyway when they sound irrelevant to my own palette or preference. Especially when Penny Arcade gives a thumbs up as well. And especially when the trailer looks and sounds cool. And definitely especially when I find out it was made by a Polish game studio (my last name, Obremski ... yeah, now you see!). Such is the case with The Witcher which I started and abandoned last September, nearly a year ago.
The mechanics of click-fest attacks and environmental interaction are not my cup of tea, but I didn't mind so much at first when the results were spectacular acrobatic swordplay or rather, sword-slaughter! Later it became more annoying to try to get him just close enough and the cursor just in the right spot to pick up that one coin or tiny ingredient or what have you. The battles resulting from your well-timed clicks are more visually than skillfully engaging, a bar which I measure by how well an anti-twitch gamer such as myself can do. Thus I liked it and it worked fine for me, even though the rhythm of clicking within certain windows of time is not something I'm extremely capable of.
However, putting the sword away, the hero is insanely incompetent at navigating the world about him, even with you peering slyly over his shoulder. He has a particular affinity to moving up or down via steps, to the ludicrous point of refusing to drop off the side of even one, necessitating an agonizingly proper journey to the end. This becomes tiresome on ranged foes and so you learn to rely on the computer-controlled path-finding (when it works) rather than engaging in walking yourself. Things like that tend to disembody me as the character's spirit and place me upon some level of deities where control is merely the act of puppetry.
Not that the world itself is particularly worthy of being parsed at the ground-level. Environmental rendition is top notch both in visual and auditory caliber, but there is very nearly no worth interaction to speak of. You can move here, not there, and that there puts you at some liquid depth without any penalty of freedom. At best you'll be on a path or road where the way is very clearly marked and at worst you'll be stuck in a bramble wondering what use a sword is when it can't cut bushes.
Towns, swamps, and forests are just cardboard backdrops to the plot which mightily attempts to serve up non-linear prose by posing choices with far-reaching and long-term effects. The laudable goal being to avoid immediate reloads after obviously poor choices. However, again, many times I simply didn't care which way I swayed and time is dependent on this task of choice. Without the player, time is frozen and all the impending conflicts as well. Because I had no particular affinity for one side or the other, I tried to spend time getting to know both only to find them sternly uninterested in explaining their merits. Rather both humans and non-humans, or whatever the groups are, tend to be arrogant and unsympathetic to the point where I merely flipped a coin to decide which troops to side with and which to tenderize.
Randomly picking plot paths aside, my true reason for stopping simply became due to tiresome travel and inventory overload. Areas are chopped up into relatively small parts choked by doors, boats, and gates. Each of these pops the slowest load screens I had ever experienced every time. It's as if the game engine flushes all the resources and then reloads all the new ones. Thus when I got to the point of needing to find some kind of ring or flowers from my bride to be (I chose to settle down, I'm sure it was going to work out perfectly), a mighty mental exhaustion enveloped me. Go find someone who looks like everyone else and sit through their inane words to get you some jewelry? Sorry babe, maybe later.
Later never came. As negative as I portray the game, I do think that if the story engages you that you'll enjoy it to the end. You get top-notch voices, sound effects, vivid music, and beautifully rendered environments. However, if you're looking for something with more of a typical RPG or sandbox feel, this is going to disappoint. Also, the dialog is either poorly translated or written by a teenager; my gut feeling is that most women will be either insulted or unable to stop laughing hysterically.
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