3/5 ★ – the_goatlover's review of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.

This is one of the weirdest experiences I have had with a game. I began very excited and loved the prologue. Then the combat was.. odd and I started getting a little frustrated. Then I started to hate the game so much I almost quit (Letho boss fight) then I started to understand it a little better, and I started liking it more. Then I felt like I had a pretty good hold on the combat and was quite enjoying myself. And then right when I started really liking the game, it was suddenly over. All in all, it was just bizarre. I will start off by saying I am sooooo glad I decided to play these first games before the third. It has really drawn me into the world and I am so excited to see the changes and characters in the 3rd game now. Overall the story of this game is great, filling in a lot of information on the world and it's major players. The characters are all fantastic and memorable and alive! I must have spent 10 minutes trying to decide on different choices and whether to save specific characters and who I wanted to trust sometmes. It really really made me care for the people and what they were experiencing. But the story seems soooo short suddenly! It plods along fairly well, but there are only 3 chapters, and it is done in a flash. But what is there is brilliant and fun to try and parse. Quickly touching on combat. It is fucking dreadful for the most part. It has a good idea that just does not pan. And many many tiny flaws meld together into a massive problem. It's hard to express all that is wrong with it if you don't actually experience it, and I'm not even sure I could properly identify all the issues that cause this. But even when I tried playing with the easy difficulty I could be doing well against an enemy, and then without any knowledge it would happen they could counter me, and basically one hit combo me to death. The inconsistencies were just always there to make a decent experience turn awful. Often when fighting mobs of enemies Geralt will lunge forward at a single one, leaving the crowd to gank him from all around, and on top of that (until you upgrade it) you take 200% damage from back stabs! It is nearly impossible to account for this as you never really know where Geralt will go and how far. Sometimes Geralt would fly across the room to strike someone, and other times I would be nearly right beside them and his swing would miss leaving me perfectly open for a counter attack. And this just happens over and over and you can't identify what keeps killing you. Eventually you learn to just kite enemies and always use Quen because it helps alleviate alot of the bullshit hits. Which do tons of damage by the way! One on one the fights work much much better, and so it just created this odd dynamic where a lot of one on one boss fights went smoother, and felt easier than a random mob of Drowners that appeared. But I see what they tried for, and it is so much more improved in witcher 3, so it had to start somewhere. Presentation was also beautiful. Heavy bloom but it kind of turns charming and an interesting art style so it's cool. Some locations are so beautiful I wanted to remain. The beginning of chapter 3 when you are in the Blue Mountains was just breathtaking. The music was so relaxing I chilled up there for 30 minutes just listening (until harpys changed it to battle music. Lame!) Weird game, glad I played. Super glad I can move on to witcher 3 now with all the story context I want.