Beaten: The Witcher Enhanced Edition

Beaten

The Witcher Enhanced Edition

System: Steam
Status: Beaten
Currently: Just beat normal difficulty.

This may be an oddity considering my previous posts where I mostly nitpick games, but I truly have nothing negative to say about this game. It is a well balanced game, the story itself is well done gothic horror, and the only issues I had were more with my poor PC than the game itself (crashes, herky graphics, etc).

I can unabashedly recommend this game, mostly due to the fact that it feels like an old school PC RPG, difficult but not overtly so, with a well crafted story and a well balanced combat system. I was playing on normal mode, so the enhancements that make up most of the back end of your character creation were helpful depending on what you focused on, but not entirely necessary. I drank a few boosting potions and used weapon boosts before the last fight, and having done nearly all the quests, I curb-stomped the final boss(es). Through most of the game though, one boost or so is enough to get you through difficult fights, with none really required for standard groups of enemies. The chapters do have a sort of progression, though its hard to tell until you walk to do a quest and get slaughtered, but essentially there are a set of easier quests, and harder ones, and you should do them in a big chunk of each to get through. The game is set up so that if you skipped some stuff in an earlier chapter, you aren't screwed, you just have to focus more on the easy quests for the next chapter first. There never felt like there was any object that if I missed it I was screwed later on, it just made it easier...which is perfect, though I still felt I had to do -everything-.

The only downside of the action combat system is there really isn't much variety or strategy to the actual combat. Occasionally you might have to switch stances or swords mid fight, but usually you can go wading in. Victory is more determined by your prepwork than any actual skill in the combat, though if you constantly screw up timed clicking you might have issues. I can gather hard mode puts even more emphasis on prep, given the descriptor even states 'You will have to use alchemy to survive'. Should be an interesting challenge when I get around to it, but that won't be anytime soon. Long PC RPGs take it out of me.