The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Reviews and Quick Look

Reviews for CD Projekt RED’s title have been slowly picking up, and judging from what we can read and the scores, it seems like the title hasn’t disappointed those who were expecting it.

GameInformer gives it a 9.25, though the text doesn’t seem quite that enthusiastic

As amazing as the role-playing is, the gameplay is merely adequate, with infrequent (but amazing) set piece moments and too-common frustrations. The third-person action-oriented combat is brutally difficult in the beginning. The game is tuned to be (realistic,) where just a few blows from any old longsword can ruin your day. Things get easier as you level and unlock new powers, but even a powerful witcher is two mis-clicks away from reloading his last save in most encounters. It’s all too easy to accidentally target something you didn’t want to and lock yourself into a long leaping attack animation. Allies are also known to come up behind you and prevent you from dodging away from an incoming strike. When the combat goes the way you want it to, it can be amazing and rewarding, but expect to regularly curse a blue streak when it doesn’t.

Inventory management is a disaster. The lame crafting system clogs your bags with hundreds of nearly useless items and rewards tiny incremental upgrades for hours of effort. You’re better off ignoring the whole thing and just picking herbs to mix with monster parts for always-useful bombs and potions. Interacting with the world is often a pain as well; targeting specific objects in the environment is so finicky that I found myself regularly shuffling back and forth and swinging the camera around to get at a plainly visible container.

Games.on.net, 4.5/5

Your decisions don’t just inform how the game feels, they also impact directly on how the game plays. Every action has a reaction, some small, some large. In the opening chapter Geralt is sent to kill a traitor. Play your cards right and you can talk the man down and get him to surrender. If you do, Geralt meets him again in a dungeon and the two can team up to escape. Yet if you kill him in the first encounter, the dungeon escape plays out entirely differently, introducing Geralt to one of the major factions in the world. The decision mentioned above, which evil man to support, has an even greater effect on the game. Your decision determines a completely different second act. Not all decisions have such large ramifications, but all of them will come back to bless or haunt you some time down the track.

More often than not decisions lead to killing, and killing, of course, leads to the new combat system. Whether or not it is an improvement on the original games’ timing based system is debatable, but it certainly is more action oriented. Combat still revolves around the concept of a steel sword for humans and a silver sword for monsters, but this time around a left click triggers a fast attach and a right click triggers a heavy attack. Hotkeys are then assigned to casting Witcher signs (spells), dodge, block, use traps and bombs. Rather bizarrely, the opening stages of the game are the most difficult. Without levelling, Geralt is a puny weakling. He dies with just a few light taps, does little damage with signs and can’t block worth a damn. As the game progresses, you’llassign skill points into the three and a half skill trees swordsmanship, alchemy, signs or Witcher skills. As a result combat becomes steadily easier and, with the exception of a few epic and somewhat frustrating giant boss battles (QTEs should be reclassified a war crime by NATO), you’ll rarely have a hard time in a fight from the middle of the game onwards (on normal difficulty at least). Speaking of the skill trees, they’re uniformly excellent, and choices of where to put skills are as meaningful as the moral choices you make in the game.

Meanwhile, the editors at Giant Bomb provides us with one of their Quick Look, set during the game’s Chapter 1, which provides a decent look on the mechanics and the structure of the game.