4.5/5 ★ – Jv1i3n's review of The Witcher: Enhanced Edition.

It’s finally good to be back on a story game after two months of not playing. I started a game that has been on my mind, but with no sort of knowledge of the story and characters. And I gotta say ‘The Witcher: Enhanced Edition’ was an absolute blast of a video game. Probably one of the greatest video game stories of all time if you ask me. The Witcher's story is an unusual one for fantasy. The world is dark and grimy in the way you'd expect actual medieval towns and landscapes to be. It's full of fear, disease, religious zealotry, and political maneuvering that results in pain for the powerless populace at large. In short, it's a window into our own world and tries to expose some of the issues that we deal with on a daily basis while still providing players the chance to control an interesting character and participate in an exciting adventure. It results in some cheesiness as the writers try to shove too many modern day problems into one game, but many of the issues are tackled in a mature fashion and we couldn't help but be drawn into this flawed but hopeful world. While tensions always seem to be high between humans, elves, dwarves, and other races of fantasy, this Polish-born tale pushes those tensions into full blown racism. While most of the epithets are cast at the "non-humans" like the elves and dwarves, the main character Geralt is not immune to the slanderous speech of the human population. While Geralt was born human, he was mutated and trained to become something both more and less. While Witchers are granted enhanced reflexes and strength and trained to slay monsters, use basic magic, and brew helpful potions, the process of mutation sterilizes them and as many observe in the game, turns them cold to others. Thusly, Geralt's adventures are not all happiness and joy in finding new friends as they are in some RPGs. Most humans are wary of Geralt, some are downright hostile and the non-humans often have the same reactions because he's part human. From the moment Geralt leaves the confined tutorial area of his home castle Kaer Morhen, he's subjected to the fears and anger of a world looking for a reason to explode. Geralt, of course, takes a defining role at the center of that explosion, one way or another. Geralt as the deciding factor in events is one of the reasons The Witcher works as a narrative and a game. The first couple of chapters of the adventure will offer up some moral decisions that may seem a little more cut and dry but when chapter three rolls around, the choices offered up are many shades of gray and it's hard to ever know that what you're doing is "right" by the video gaming standard of black and white right and wrong. Are you helping elves fighting for freedom and equality or terrorists that have just as much hatred of humans as humans have of them? Do the ends of preserving and protecting humanity really justify the potentially horrific means? Do I love Triss or Shani or just view them as toys for my amusement? These ideological, political, and personal decisions make the story and the game more engrossing as you sit there and wonder “what did I just do?” The strength of the martial combat is in constant need to change between fight styles to accommodate different types of human and monster enemies. Double tapping on direction keys will also cause Geralt to dodge out of the way to get better positioning for the fight, which plays a very important role when combating certain enemies. The end result can turn into a ballet of death. When combined with signs, potions, and bombs, and the ability to charge up melee and sign attacks, the combat becomes even better. Geralt has access to five different signs which range from direct damage to causing fear or pain which can stun enemies. Stunned or fallen enemies can be clicked on for a final finishing move regardless of their health status. It makes using the correct tool pretty important when fighting large groups of strong enemies that might not get hurt much by the group style of sword fighting. CDProjekt has also tried to break up the story and combat with a couple of mini-games in the form of boxing and poker. Sadly, neither of these is really worth the time. While they can offer up a way to make money, it's more like cheating than a mini-game. The poker AI is very, very poor and makes incredibly bad decisions, even after the patch. They'll re-roll three-of-a-kinds when they have the game won, roll only one die when they need to roll two to get a straight to win the hand and so on. It's pretty sad. Boxing is dumb for an entirely different reason. Mini-games are meant to be a break in the action, offering a refreshingly different style of gameplay. Boxing is basically just like sword fighting, but with fists, and worse. If you're going to have a boxing game, why not make it more like Punch-Out! or something? Potions play a pretty huge role in the game, especially on the high difficulty setting, which is why we're a little sad it wasn't implemented better. It's not that the system itself is broken. On the contrary, the amount of potions and effects are varied and support a variety of play styles. The problem is almost entirely with the inventory system. Everywhere you go in the world, you can collect ingredients for potions off of plants, mineral deposits, killed creatures, or stashes. Each substance has one or two possible ingredient uses. The problem is, you can't sort them easily by ingredient type, you can't look before you go to brew potions if you have enough of any type, and you'll have to constantly look back to your journal to have any clue what you need to make a potion. This is especially aggravating after you start stashing stuff at the inns (inns act as a universal bank so that you can grab your stuff from any of them). There's no sorting tool at the inns at all so you'll have to mouse over and constantly check back and forth between substances to see if you've got the right ones. Since alchemy is such a huge part of the game, the interface for it (and especially the inventory) should have been given more careful consideration. It leads to a lot of aggravation when you constantly have to run back and forth to the inn and load in and out of areas in order to get the right amount of potion made. The Witcher really is a good game and one that PC RPG fans will surely enjoy. It combines some entertaining and fast-paced combat with a well realized world and pretty decent story that branches and can end in three different fashions. With a load of choice in character creation on a point assignment and morality level, there’s plenty of reason to want to come back and play the 40-50 hour game again. The big problems mainly sit with the technical issues like crash bugs and long load times can be very frustrating. If it wasn't for those things The Witcher would have scored better here. If you can look past the technical side of things (which are still not as bad as some other RPGs released recently) The Witcher is definitely a game you’ll remember well over the years.