EmP's The Witcher review

This was a fun review with some great lines, and it makes the game sound like one I shouldn't continue to ignore. Liking the second and third game in the series should have offered me a clue along those lines, I know. I enjoyed this line in particular: "In town, you're viewed as a child-kidnapping albino philanderer - even if you're only most of those things - and nobody likes you." Also, the last line made me chuckle. You should listen to the voice in your head a bit more often, maybe, if listening turns out like this!

Uh... I'll be blunt. As a review, this strikes me as this-shouldn't-have-even-been-approved-from-a-reader bad. It's basically telling the story of a fair chunk of the game, ending abruptly at one point, completely spoiling that part but hardly mentioning any other game elements except the story. Admittedly, the narrative and atmosphere do shine (I for one am also fond of the combat system, there's a flow to it that's rare in games, but most aren't), but just presenting it does not make a review. And neither does just covering a part of the game and then ending abruptly. And spoiling that part so thoroughly should at the very least come with serious warnings, regardless of how old the game is.

Heh, I remember, on a blog post, picking this game for you to review. And you did!

This game was a bit of an odd duck, with such things as the rhythm/timed approach to combat and the nudie cards (GOTTA GET 'EM ALL), but one could also say that about the second game and how it seemed to be about 50x harder in the opening chapter than it was for the rest of it. This one did have its annoyances (still PISSED over how many times I had to reload it because one cutscene in post-riot Vizima didn't load properly and crashed the game...and I do less-than-fondly recall having to regularly manually delete saves because this game just created a new auto-save file EVERY DAMN TIME I did anything like enter or exit a building, causing my computer to get overloaded by unnecessary files.

But I did enjoy the overall experience and liked reading your take on the stuff Geralt does and the sorts of people he has to interact with. It kind of brought me back to finishing this game and thinking, "Ah, Radovec (or whatever his name actually is) is now the king and has the girl; that young man is going places!" and then playing the rest of the series and, uh, well, that didn't age well!