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The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings reviewGame: The Witcher 2: Assassins of KingsPlatform: PC Genre: Action RPG (Fantasy) Developer: CDProjekt |
Staff review by
Jason Venter 
July 07, 2011
It’s time for a confession: after playing The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for many wonderful hours, I now want to persuade every serious PC gamer I can to buy it and play it and love it, just as I have. I feel comfortable admitting my agenda because until I played it for myself, I had only passing interest in the title. It looked like it might be good, but that’s true of a lot of games and I wasn’t going to lose much sleep over the matter if I never got to play it at all.The many dozens of hours that I spent with the game changed that, though. Perhaps inevitably, I’ve fallen in love with the depressing world inhabited by Geralt of Rivia. Here is an experience that has captured my imagination so thoroughly that awarding it anything less than a 10 feels like a betrayal. Yet no matter how much I love the game and might wish otherwise, its flaws can’t be completely ignored. Somehow, that’s appropriate for a game that works as hard to avoid perfect black and white as this one does.
One of the game’s most obvious problems is that its enemies are recycled. You won’t notice it at first, but it’ll get to you by the end. There are only a few monster breeds throughout the world: harpies, nekkers, endregas, drowners, trolls, bullvores and a few other assorted beasts. Mostly, you fight human soldiers from one faction or another and the thing that differentiates one guy from the next is that he’s holding a long-range pike or he’s wearing robes and tossing fireballs at you or he has a shield and knows how to use it so you have to outsmart him and flank him.
There also are a limited number of environments to actually explore--just four distinct areas, with two that are expansive and two that feel small but only by comparison--and some of the character models repeat a lot. So do the lines you spout as you’re carving apart monsters of one sort or another. There’s nothing like going one-on-one against a massive beast, duking it out for several minutes, then hearing your character ask with disgust “How many more of you are there?” Uh… there’s just the one, I hope!
The game also boasts an array of irritating technical flaws, though the number of those that you actually are likely to encounter is anyone’s guess. Those flaws range from the extremely rare case of a person floating in the air or getting trapped in a wall or melting out of sight, to instances where you can’t draw or sheathe your sword and you’re being swarmed by monsters or by town guards who are angry with you for your impertinence.
Sometimes, though not frequently, you’ll have to load a previous save to rectify an issue that you have encountered. Sometimes textures are slow to populate even on super-powerful computers like mine (which easily exceeds the recommended requirements to run the game) and you’re left looking at a character who seems to have been fashioned out of putty until weather-worn creases spread across his face and a proper nose and eyes flicker into sight. A freeze or two is likely over the course of the many hours that you’ll probably spend with the game, as well.
It’s easy to appreciate that the issues that affect The Witcher 2 would kill a boring game, one that goes through familiar and now-tired motions, because no one likes bugs and some of the stuff that happens here can really pull you out of the moment. Gamers put up with those same issues and worse in the really good games, though, and we have every reason in the world to put up with them here because--glitches and hiccups aside--there’s perhaps no better adventure title on the market.
Interestingly, The Witcher 2 earns that praise by not trying to revolutionize much of anything. The game’s strongest point--a twisting plot that you actually control, with fiendishly good moral twists and characters and a world you’ll care about--is exactly the sort of thing that ambitious developers have been trying to produce for years. It seems fair to say, though, that none of them have met with quite this much success.
I thought until now that I hated games that rely on plot to compel the player to keep playing. There’s a reason for that, though: I was playing the wrong games. Most experienced gamers have too many times run into titles that try to capture us in some fantasy world or another and nothing ever quite gels. There are the occasional exceptions every few years, but mostly I’ve come to regard plot as the stuff that happens when you’re not being allowed to play a game.
If you’ve had similar experiences in the past, then you owe it to yourself to give The Witcher 2 a try. Once you do, you’ll likely agree that there’s always a place for a good enough story.
My own experience went like this: I started playing the game and, after a tasteful sex scene alerted me to the fact that this wasn’t another “Saved by the Bell” for dragon lovers, there were scenes full of people talking and naming places and villains and such that meant nothing to me. I soldiered on through those first few minutes because everything looked fantastic. There was a moment not far into my quest, for instance, when I stood on the side of a crumbling castle parapet and I looked out over a red-hued sky choked with smoke rising from burning buildings and obscuring distant towers. I almost wet myself when I realized that I could actually walk between those buildings, enter that tower. I had entered what felt like an actual fantasy world, with buildings that were more than level hubs or set pieces.
If that’s as far as the developers went to establish a credible world, though, my affection for The Witcher 2 would have quickly diminished. The first ten times you run through a fantastically-realized forest it’s great, but eventually you’ve seen every gnarled, moss-covered trunk and have watched the cascading waterfall long enough that such things no longer impress. If you’re not invested, the only thing that matters is finding the next surprise.
The Witcher 2 doesn’t stop with waterfalls and ferns, though, or even with prostitutes and foul-mouthed dwarves and snide noblemen. It paints this fantastic world full of complicated people and it lets you interact with all of that in such a way that eventually, like Geralt himself, you are unable to continue as a passive observer. You have a stake in what happens to the people around you, a position in the middle of all of it that you chose for yourself through your prior actions. You watch someone take a dagger to the chest and you realize with surprise that you care about that crumpling pile of pixels and polygons because you’d kind of grown to like him and because now that he’s lying in a pool of blood, that’s going to be a problem for all sorts of other folks. Late in the game, as I had to decide whether to let a monarch walk out of the room or fall at my hand, I paused and actually spent a few minutes trying to consider the choice from all of the angles because this wasn’t a case where wrong is wrong and right is right.
Indeed, the world of The Witcher 2 seems to have been designed--like the series of short stories and novels on which it is based, or so I hear--specifically to avoid insincere questions of morality. In real life, it’s not always clear what will work most to your advantage or to the advantage of those for whom you fight. Most computer games that try to incorporate moral and ethical dilemmas feel like they’re asking you to choose whether to put out a fire with water or gasoline. Here, you’re following a story about elves and dwarves and a hero with amnesia and it feels like it means something because “right” and “wrong” feel like nothing more than convenient fairytales and because the guy you met at the tavern has never felt more like someone that here in the real world might be your best friend.
You can ignore all of that if you like, of course. You can dismiss The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings as just another CRPG with pretty graphics, technical issues and a guy with a sword too big and amnesia too trite. People make mistakes all the time.
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