4.5/5 ★ – abe213's review of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

It’s a safe assessment that eighty per cent of the characters in The Witcher 3 do not want you there. They hate you offering your services and detest you even more when they’re forced to part with their hard-earned coin. Your mere appearance, it seems, is but to weigh heavy on their soul. With such a depressing outlook, it’s a wonder CD Projekt’s pièce de résistance isn’t one big sad slog – quite the opposite. The Witcher hosts a vibrant world brimming with opportunity. You need only stagger your way around to see it all. As someone long weary of fetch quests and open-world nonsense, to be as enamored as I am with this game is somewhat of a miracle. Wrapped in mystique, I’m eager to explore every arcane cranny. A dodgy-looking hole? Better believe I’m going down there for what could be as little reward as a loaf of bread. Appropriately, ‘wild’ is the word I’d use to best describe the massive world of Temeria. The harsh, windswept landscape feels anything but safe, bringing with it treasure, beasts and happenstance which could see you stashing a new bit of steel, or assertively pirouetting over a cliff. Among its many creatures, hazardous fish-men ‘Drowners’ roam both land and sea, scratching at your heels as you pop down to explore that chest, wreck, or newly discovered three-storied Temerian Atlantis. It’s a land lived-in and a seamless melding of scene, weather and soundscape that brings forth a magnificent and detailed melancholy – the mood and intimacy of The Last of Us mixed with the beauty and breadth of Red Dead Redemption. A simple stroll shows just how beautiful Temeria must have been before the war. Sweeping hills, plunging valleys and more than one glorious sunset still lighten the landscape, but the earth is now stained with blood from battles not long fought. Overturned carriages litter the back roads whilst lynched corpses sway quietly in the breeze. A warning. The shoes-on-the-power-line of this world. It’s strange then that a team could build to such heights yet erect the foundations in a bog. Plagued by clunkiness, movement in The Witcher 3 feels like parkour through molasses – weighty and frustrating in equal measure. Never have I been more aware of gravity than prancing the coastline to be met with an untimely demise courtesy of what must’ve been a slippery ledge or perhaps an overly oily pair of boots? Keen to check that chest on the bluff? Prepare to amble tentatively and god help you if you overcompensate in acceleration. You’ll be eating more dirt than a Rock Troll. To afford a humanoid the weight and steering of a dual-skid catamaran is both bold and baffling, and it’s unfortunate that the plethora of boats littering the numerous lakes, seas and Temeria’s main river, the Pontar, already push The Witcher 3 well over its quota of maritime vessels. Sadly, there’s just no room for the S.S. Geralt. The Witcher 3 also comes pre-packaged with one of the most ruthless fall damage systems I’ve seen. Anything more than a small drop and you’re a crumpled husk. It’s as if CD Projekt Red had a delayed reaction to the Crouching Tiger-like jumping of Bethesda’s Oblivion and set out to create the most grounded RPG imaginable, quite literally. Fortunately, this kind of weight translates well to combat. Everything from a quick slash to a flashy upward arc feels both powerful and hefty. Enemies come with a reasonable head on their shoulders, and bandits, pirates or any of the numerous creatures will rally, mob and use their numbers to cut you down before you can get your own in. If respected, the combat system can give way to some excitingly grim finishers: an above waist vivisection, a kneeling decapitation or a grand height reduction by way of a sweeping kick… with a sword. Keep a quick dodge at the ready, and you’ll be lopping off legs in no time. For the most part, The Witcher 3 is astonishingly beautiful and without doubt, one of the best looking games on the PS4. So good are the visuals that it feels a disservice to any more than lightly jog the streets of its largest city, Novigrad, for all the things you may miss. Unfortunately, such a detailed palette has it slightly outreach its technical grasp. Load times are lengthy (prepare to pop the jug on should you die) and frames do take a dive in the more detailed and intensive areas such as Crookback Bog. The game also suffers from a team adjusting to mucking about on consoles. The interface is cumbersome, and the inventory: a grid-based system with egregiously small type. It may work on PC, but all that squinting and rummaging can quickly become tiresome without a mouse. But, it’s an easy trade and The Witcher 3’s achievements far outweigh its missteps. The cast of characters is massive and always interesting. Individuals come pre-packaged with their own fears, loves, motivations and hatreds (you, mainly) and this affords a decent whack of nuance to side quests whilst aiding in the helix questing system – strands of adventures running together to breed unforeseen consequences and ethical dilemmas, which are themselves, only often made known tens of hours down the line. These mature and bite-sized fairy tales are riddled with choice, and don’t exist to their own end but to enrich a larger framework. Think you’re a good person? Think again, because you’ve just ruined the lives of four families in one go! The story design is remarkable and going forward, it’s this quality of quest that should set the standard for all RPGs. It’s exhausting to even consider the effort that went to making The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt so detailed and interesting. Countless hours and I still have so much to explore, a near continent of monsters to slay, and numerous lives to make drastically worse. It’s not a perfect fantasy but thus far, it’s the best we could have imagined.