Review: The Witcher – Enhanced Edition

I’d heard about The Witcher over the last couple of years, but never really paid much attention to it until I got my hands on a review copy of the Enhanced Edition.  What happened is that the polish company game company CD Projekt spent a lot of money developing the game, and when it was finally released in October of 2007 it was received quite well but plagued by various technical issues.  What the company decided to do, which is rare these days, is to fully re-release the game in an “Enhanced” form in a hope to fix many of the issues with the original.  By and large they succeeded quite well, and The Witcher: Enhanced Edition is one of the better medieval-gothic mature rated roleplaying games to come out for the computer in the last couple of years.

The Witcher takes place in a world filled with ruined castles, werewolves, vampires, evil wizards, and all of the sorts of creepy supernatural stuff you love to find lurking about at night in a moonlit European setting.  The game starts with a very well done, but a little lengthy, cinematic that depicts the main character of the game Geralt entering a village and solving a mystery involving a noble’s daughter and a vicious monster.  You eventually play as Geralt after some unknown events leave him in the wilderness with partial amnesia. He is still a specialized occult monster hunter (known as Witchers), but he’s lost a lot of the cool skills and items he had in the introduction.  The entire game consists of an appropriately short but eventful prologue, followed by five chapters. 

One of the first things that surprised me is that the game is much more of a roleplaying game then I’d ever expected: there are a lot of dialogue choices and decisions to be made along the way.  At least in the prologue, it makes great use of a choose-your-own-adventure style gameplay by presenting the player with the choice of where you go, while the NPC’s take care of the other path and the outcome is different based on who you decide to help.

The writing and dialogue itself is good, but sometimes cheesey and I wouldn’t call it one of the highlights of the game.  There are quite a few scene transitions that are abrupt and surprising, sometimes taking you right to a loading screen before you even know what’s happening.  The environments are really well thought out, and add to the atmosphere of the game in excellent ways, while the character models are also good but they are often re-used for NPC’s as well as the same voice actors pop up for many of the NPC’s.  The game’s combat system feels very repetitive at first, but as the game progresses the combat takes more of a back seat, so this becomes less of a problem.  The Witcher utilizes three combat systems, one for fighting against large/tough opponents, one for fighting against small/agile opponents, and one for fighting against large numbers of weaker opponents.  This spices up the combat to a little more than just pointing a clicking, and if you attack in timed progressions you create combos that are more effective.

Once you get to the point of leveling up your character, the wealth of options available become apparent.  You can specialize in normal combat techniques, silvered weapon techniques that are used against supernatural creatures, magic, and each of your stats/abilities can be leveled up to gain special benefits as well.  The multitude of character options, combined with the overall storyline, side quests, and dialogue options all contribute to make The Witcher feel like a very full and fleshed out RPG. If you enjoyed games like the Vampire branded games, Undying, or the more occult quests in fantasy games like Oblivion, then The Witcher is the game for you.  It presents a fairly unique mix of medival occult lore with a dash of high fantasy and quite a bit of mature elements that I think give it a unique feel from many of the other games that have come out in the last two years.

The Enhanced Edition comes with a lot of extra content including two bonus adventures, a complete game guide, a bonus behind-the-scenes DVD, the soundtrack to the game, and a CD of music inspired by the game.  With the amount of actual content that the game comes with, in addition to the amount of gameplay available compared to most other games, makes The Witcher a really good value for the lower pricetag.