Quick Review - The Witcher 2

A Quick Review of...

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

CD Projekt Red

REDengine

Windows, OS X, XBOX 360

Action, RPG, Hack-n-slash

May 17, 2011

Preamble

So I picked up The Witcher on GOG.com in early 2011 as a result of seeing some early gameplay footage of The Witcher 2, and being blown away from what I saw. With The Witcher, I was greeted with an unexpectedly immersive and adult oriented RPG with its main drawback being mediocre combat mechanics. But it hooked me. The story, characters, setting; all of it sucked me in and made me care about the world.

Despite my satisfaction with The Witcher, I didn't get around to playing the sequel until now. It was one of those games that sat in the backlog, and every time I thought about playing it, I came up with some excuse to justify not starting quite yet. I'm quite disappointed with myself for putting it off this long, but better late than never, right?

With recent news of the development of The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt (which is going to be open-world!!) and CD Projekt Red's new IP Cyberpunk 2077, my desire to jump back into the world of Temeria was rekindled. I couldn't be happier that I did, as this is easily the best game that I've played so far this year.

The Quick

Play the role of Geralt of Rivia, a famous witcher (essentially a mutant bounty hunter that hunts monsters) playing bodyguard for King Foltest, when all hell breaks lose. The king is assassinated pretty much right under your nose (not really a spoiler as it happens almost immediately) and you are the prime suspect. Your job is to find who's responsible and clear your name. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg, the story branches in many different directions, presenting you with plenty of decisions to make and monsters to fight, resulting in an exceptional RPG experience.

The Good

• Combat. Clearly a massive improvement to the pseudo-QTE (quick time event) combat of The Witcher. The combat is technical, challenging, and fun to engage in. Timing is critical in stringing together combos with your strong attacks, weak attacks, and magic and even more essential in dodging and parrying.
  
  
• Deep story made possible by great writing. Not only is the overarching main story rich with a variety of character arcs to encounter and decisions to make, there’s a plethora of content to explore on the side that illuminates the world and characters in a variety of ways. Outside of a couple of MMO-like collection quests, the side quest content is quite robust and punctuated by great story lines that tie back into the main plot. 
  
• Replay value. Depending on what choices you make during Chapter 1 of the game, you will see one of two completely different versions of Chapter 2. Different village to explore, different characters, and different quests. Couple that with the generous amount of story changing side quests throughout the game and you've got yourself a sizable number of possible outcomes. Few games really do this well so I have to give props to CD Projekt Red for clearly putting an emphasis on player choice and individuality in this game. As an RPG enthusiast, I LOVE to see stuff like this.
  
• Graphics. The visuals in this game are out of this world. Perfect lighting, vibrant colors, wonderfully detailed character models and succinct, smooth animations to go along with them. This game came out almost 2 years ago now, and it still stands out as one of the most visually stunning games to date, in my opinion. Kudos to CD Projeckt on their RED Engine, it is downright spectacular.
  
  
  

  

  Just to put things in perspective, here's a screenshot from The Witcher.

  
  

  

  Still shots really don't do this game justice, but you get the idea.

  
  
• Sound. So many great things about the sound in this game. The music is spot on. It fits in the setting perfectly, and helps a great deal in immersing you in the culture of your environment and surroundings. The ambient sounds you encounter throughout the towns and out in the wilderness are just as engrossing as the music. Then there's the voice acting. From the little kids playing in the thoroughfare to the oftentimes antagonizing banter of villagers to the intimate conversations you have with your significant others, everything sounds natural and great.

The Bad

• Character customization. While there’s a ton of skills to pick from for customizing your build and a good deal of decision making to shape Geralt into someone unique to your role playing tastes, you are largely stuck with Geralt... as Geralt. While this wasn’t a big deal for me, as I think Geralt is a badass character, I could see people wanting some more wiggle room with customizing their character.
  
  
• Region sizes. While there is a ton of quest and story content in this game, the environments are somewhat limited in size. You will spend a lot of time running around the same villages and covering a lot of the same ground throughout the chapters. This was a complaint I had about The Witcher as well, and while they've improved the size of the regions, I was hoping they'd open things up a bit more.
  
  
• Reverse difficulty curve. The game is top heavy in terms of difficulty. It will absolutely kick your ass initially, especially as you're trying to figure out the combat mechanics. But as you progress through the game and level up, things just get much easier, to the point that by the end of the game you are downright dominating anything that crosses your path.

The Verdict

Despite its minor flaws, The Witcher 2 will go down as one of my favorite RPGs of this generation, hands down. If you fancy yourself an RPG enthusiast, even in a minor respect, get this game immediately. To put a cherry on top of this great experience, CD Projekt Red has to be one of the most respectable game developers I've come across. They deliver great games, release gigantic content patches for free, and distribute their games without DRM. If nothing else, pick this up just to support the efforts of this great company.

The Extras

Unfortunately, I forgot to record any video (or really take any screenshots) while I was playing this game, and since the review, I had to clear it off the hard drive to make some room. Therefore I can't show you any authentic Thomp gameplay today, but I will provide a couple videos.

This was a new introduction video added for the Enhanced Edition. It is amazing.

This is a short environment walkthrough with one of the developers. It gives you a good idea of what the game looks like.