The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Review

As CD Projekt RED decided to not send unfinished code to the press, reviews for The Witcher 2 are still few and far between. Every single one of them has been positive so far though, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun doesn’t look like it’s going to invert this trend with their own.

It’s a peculiarly ill-judged baptism of fire (literally at some points). Where you’re expecting a game to teach you how it works and lead you by the hand, The Witcher 2 offers nothing but a few text-based tips boxes. If you don’t take time to figure out that you have to constantly dodge away with the spacebar, or use magic to buff your combat, you are going to struggle. And the game does not tell beginners this. The spells are barely mentioned, and you’ll need to stop and figure it out for yourself if you want to know what they do. While there are situations in which they /are/ introduced to you, at no point are you explicitly taught that it is a lot easier if you use the shield power to protect yourself in combat, for example

Of course by this point many gamers will have dropped difficulty from Normal, to Easy. You can do this at any time in the game, which is a friendly feature, but there’s an issue with that. Difficulty of combat on Easy is too easy. You can basically grind down any enemy by just beating them to death, and that’s not satisfying. Normal is much better, as you have to think, move, parry, and use magic in a timely fashion to win. This is a real challenge, however, and often just too hard. Frustratingly, Geralt is slightly too slow for this to really be a fluid experience. You will find yourself hammering keys while waiting for animations to play out. Although the system is extremely elegant, and soon mastered, your own skills then become limited by this mechanical system. You want Geralt to get up faster, to cast the spell when you demand it, and so on. He’s simply not agile enough to make for a truly satisfying combat experience. This is probably the biggest problem The Witcher 2 faces.