5/5 ★ – jake84's review of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Complete Edition.

When the Netflix adaptation turned the books into a cheap, Xena: The Warrior Princess-looking travesty, it’s good to play a game that did Sapkowski’s writing justice. This is an absolute masterpiece, but I still need to state what’s lacking about it, especially because it’s such a splendid experience that the few glaring mistakes stand out: - It’s still a little bit “Euro janky”. There are a few bugs here and there. Geralt getting stuck in rock formations. One crash during 50 hours. Some weird graphical errors. Yeah, I know it’s almost ridiculous to ask for perfection in a game this exhaustive and intricate and comprehensive, but this is the complete version of the game we’re talking about, and the kinks should have been worked out by now. - Roach. That fucking horse. Is worthless. It always appears the most annoying of places. Always twenty unnessecary yards away. It’s cumbersome to navigate. Takes hours to get going. I often decided against using Roach, and just ran instead. - The combat system. It’s not like every third person action-RPG needs to be compared to, say, Elden Ring, but the lock on/targeting system just seems so unresponsive and archaic; like it somehow even predates 2015. The camera mixed with automatic targeting (when you’ve switched it on) is often making the game even harder than it’s supposed to be, because it seems to have a life of its own and rarely switches to the enemy closest to you, but rather just a random enemy. Also, I find it weird how you can’t lock on to some bosses. - It’s too long. I know this sounds like a champagne problem, but I can’t just let some optional quests and waypoints go, and there’s an obscene amount of caves, horse races, fist fights, contracts, guarded treasures, monster nests, bandit camps, places of power and so on. I genuinely think that the content would have felt infintely more fulfilling and special had there been 30 percent less of it or so. To make you cherish it instead of just crossing it off a list. For that matter, every conversation goes on for a little too long. Every exchange being just a little too in love with its own dialogue. - Lastly, I don't like how all the female characters are supposed to look "sexy" or, stated in a more cynical way, "fuckable". In fact, you can just tell whether someone is evil or not, based on how they look; all villains are ugly, and all women who aren't attractive are evil or somehow unpleasant. Attractive = good person. It feels a little binary in a game that's otherwise great at describing and portraying morally grey dilemmas.