Sunday, 5 January 2014

2012.16: The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

This is one universe I didn't want to leave. And hell, I didn't know I was in. I would start in the morning and play until night and it didn't even feel like I was playing a game: The presentation, the dialogue, the story, the cities, every small thing about the universe was expertly created and it just drew me in and never let me go.

I mean I can't stress this enough, in most RPGs, after four lines of dialogue I am tapping skip like crazy because I either got the gist of it or I'm bored to tears. Every character I talked to in this game, I was listening to with full attention. It was sooooo refreshing to not have to talk to cliche filler snore-fest characters all the time.

Love the side missions. This is one of those games where side missions are so in depth they can be mistaken for main ones. Absolutely fantastic and most of them bring great intrigue to the location and to key and non-key characters.

So the universe and mission design was absolutely perfect.


Let's start with the negatives. The fighting on Normal gets pretty easy once you get used to it. Aard, attack, run, Aard, attack, run always works. And the game did very little (other than the boss fights) to make you change the way you play. More enemy variety would have been welcome.

Also the skill tree. While it is nice and in depth, it's just badly balanced I felt. Nothing really jumped out at me and made me go "YES! Can't wait to upgrade to that!"...Everything was at "eh, I guess I can use that" level. This took a bit of fun out of levelling up.

That's pretty much it. I am going to enjoy it and soak it in for a few days and then start my Dark playthrough and this brings another huge plus, which is the story, as focused and awesome as it was, still manages to have a lot of paths that changes the game in a lot of major ways. So I can't wait to experience that.


Five months in, and easily contender for GOTY and it is without any doubt what-so-ever, the best WRPG for me.

9/10.

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