The Witcher Reviews

A trio of new reviews for Atari and CD Projekt’s The Witcher have descended upon us on this Halloween. The first is at Hooked Gamers with an overall score of 8/10:

The Witcher is a fantastic example of what a creative team can do with a deep universe such as the world created by Andrzej Sapkowski. Give this team a powerful engine and a lot of freedom to interpret the source materials, and the result is a simply fabulous Next-Gen game that oozes style and ambiance. The beauty of it all is that it really doesn’t matter whether or not you have read the books.

The second is at Kotaku with no overall score:

I love The Witcher. Well, I love most of The Witcher. The story line, the combat, the characters, the environments…I love just about every aspect of the game. Having said that, I can’t play for more than a couple of hours at a time until the load time issues drive me completely insane. It’s really tragic that a game with so much replay potential has this one, huge, glaring flaw that makes me want to set it aside rather than go through it again. Perhaps a patch down the road will address the issue, but until then be prepared to wait.

And the third is at GameDaily with an overall score of 6/10:

The Witcher also has a day and night cycle, with the worst monsters coming out in the evening. Although there’s nothing wrong with this, areas to rest and further the clock are spread out, and nothing is quite as annoying as waiting for some NPC to wake up, or for the sun to set so that some monsters can finally rise out of the water, but all of these issues build up to a larger one. It’s hard to care about the story or any of the characters. Even though the game graphics generate some pretty good looking characters, they all lack facial expressions, and most don’t even use hand gestures. With that said, characters rattle off lines while staring blankly into space, like statues with moving mouths. This game even has the silly role-playing convention where players can walk into any house and poke through the cupboards, cabinets and chests to take anything they please without repercussions. Then toss in the side story about non-human races like Dwarves and Elves forming guerilla squads against humans, and the narrative becomes almost impossible to take seriously, especially since the humans nicknamed these groups “squirrels.”

It doesn’t sound like that guy at GameDaily likes role-playing games at all. And, for the record, you don’t have to wait for NPCs to wake up before speaking to them.