The Witcher is an exclusive PC role playing game. The game is set following Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy series. At first I held off on picking this game up because I had heard that the load times were just unbearable. The developers released a patch though that severely cut back on load times.

The thing that really sets this game apart from any other RPG that I have played is the story in combination with the atmosphere of the game. I don’t want to really say much about the story line though because I do not want to ruin anything for people that have not played the game yet. The basics of the story though are that the main character, Geralt, is a Witcher, a human that was mutated by magic and potions to be able to kill any monster that he comes across. There are very few Witchers left in the world and the game starts off with your stronghold being attacked. The rest of the game you are trying to seek vengeance on the people that raided the stronghold and to recover the items that they stole. It may sound simple but that is the very minimum that I can say about the plot, I assure you that it is much deeper than that though.

The atmosphere is much more mature than I have seen in any other RPG to date. While walking around in the city you will occasionally walk past drunkards in the streets that are stumbling around drunk and they may even be pissing in the street, the whores in the slums of the city a fairly vulgar in trying to entice you into purchasing their services while in the wealthier areas of the cities they are much more refined. Another aspect that contributed to the overall mood of the game is the racial slurs about Witchers as you walk by, in some areas this is done a little too much though and it gets to be a little bit annoying.

The combat differs from the standard PC RPG. While it is still a click to attack system, the combat is not a click fest. Geralt has two swords, silver and steel, that are effective against different types of creatures. With each sword you have three different styles of combat that vary in the moves that they offer and which enemies they are most effective against. Each sword style is actually a combination of different attacks and you only need to click to continue the combo. If you click too early or too late the combo will end and you will need to start it over again from the beginning. As you level you can increase the amount of attacks that are in the combo for any given sword style.

The other major aspect of the combat system is magic use. Throughout the course of the game Geralt will learn five spells. Each spell differs greatly from the others and depending on how you build your character some of them will become very powerful. In addition to the base use of the spell each spell also has a power up feature which is completely different based on the spell that you are using. Personally I stuck to the fire spell and the mind control spell that you get for most of the game on my first play through. This time around though I think I’m going to stick to the shield spell and the knockdown spell. Each spell has its uses but if you do not put points into them while leveling they will be fairly useless.

Alchemy also plays a large role in the game. There are a couple ways that you can learn to make potions, bombs, and weapon oils which are buying books that teach you how to use them or to experiment with different ingredients and hope you actually make something. The use of potions is a must in this game and they work differently than they do in most games. Each potion has a certain amount of toxicity assigned to it so you can not just drink as many potions as you want at any given time. If Geralt’s toxicity goes above a certain point red dots will start appearing in your vision, when his toxicity reaches its maximum Geralt simply dies. Potions are also not instant effects that last for a short duration of time. Most potions will last twelve hours or more in game time while some will only last for a couple of hours. The types of potions that you can make are widely varied from increasing health regeneration to injuring anybody that spills your blood to being able to see in the dark without a torch. Oils will increase the damage that a certain type of enemy takes and are not as vital as potions are to your survival. My first play through I never picked up the ability to make bombs so I do not know much about them.

The skill system in the game is fairly open ended but it will not let you advance a specific skill to its highest potential right off the bat. This is done by having three types of skills; bronze, silver, and gold. Depending on the level that you just reached you are given a certain amount of skills of specific colors. You choose which skills that you take and when but you will never be able to have every skill in the game. Most of the skills are passive increases to damage output and defense in various ways. As you get later in the game and start getting gold skills it gets tough choosing which ones to take since you do not get too many of them.

While you are following the course of the game you are often presented with decisions on which quests that you want to take and how you want to complete them. All of these decisions will change the story in some ways and may affect much larger things. An example of this is one of the quests in act one has two ways to complete it. The way that I completed it resulted in a character being alive in act two that I did not even know about at this time. That character was vital to me completing some quests in act two. If I choose the other way to complete the act one quest I would’ve had to finish the other quests in a different manner. Another result of your decisions is which allies you have in the distinct orders in the society. This ranges from who will give you missions, which vendors you can deal with, who will fight with you in times of need, and will completely change act five. Some decisions that you make will result in certain characters refusing to speak to you for the rest of the game. This is the first game that I have played that I actually felt that the choices that I made mattered and it added a lot to the overall experience.

Earning money is not as easy in this game as it is most games which can be fairly annoying especially near the beginning. The reason for this annoyance is that there are books that you need to buy to learn how to harvest certain items from slain monsters which add up in cost quite quickly. You also need to buy books to be able to identify plants in order to gain ingredients from them as well but these books are overall optional. The reason that the monster books are needed unlike the plant books is that the items they teach you to skin from monsters are the items that are needed to complete quests. Overall this system would not be too bad if it weren’t for the fact that some quests pay you less when you finish them than it cost you to buy the book for the quest.

There are a couple of mini-games though that are available that will greatly increase your available funds. The first of which is fist fighting. This is available in every inn and will earn you a little bit of cash for each opponent that you defeat. Overall fist fighting is a watered down version of normal combat that does not flow well at all. The other mini-game is dice poker. It is played with a set of five dice and handles much like poker but using six sided dice instead of cards. Dice poker can make you a lot of money very quickly, especially if you save before each game so you can reload if you loose.

While to plot line flows smoothly for most of the game there are times that it just seems that some things were cut out of the game for some reason. The most glaring example of this is that one character that was deeply involved in the story line in act two gets stuck in a dialogue loop that you have no idea what he is actually talking about in act three. Another aspect of this is the random cut scenes that are thrown in periodically to explain to you what the results of some decisions were. These would not be too bad if they were not done in a slide show format of still images.

Another issue that I had with the game is that there is next to no variation in weapons, you always use swords. Now there are other weapons and there is a great selection of weapons, they are just completely useless compared to the swords that you get through out the game since they do not work with your combat styles. I would like the massive flail that I’m carrying around to be more useful than being able to sell it for some coin or because I think it looks cool. Another issue that I had with the gear in the game is that there are only three sets of armor throughout the entire game. The first one you get in the prologue, the second set is available in act 2, and the third set you do not get until act 5. I just got sick of looking at the same armor for the majority of the game.

Even after a couple of patches there are a few bugs that severely take away from the enjoy ability of the game. The worst of these bugs is the fact that the game randomly crashes and freezes up. This does not happen frequently enough for the game to be unplayable but it is fairly annoying. The other bug that I found to be annoying is that some of the quest updates were not translated from Polish. Fortunately the quests that this happened on were pretty straight forward and I was able to figure out what I had to do next anyway.

Overall I was very impressed with the game. The Witcher has easily earned its place in my top five list of RPG’s knocking Secret of Mana off of the list. If you pick up this game though make sure you download the latest patch or you will be dealing with load times that are a few minutes long. There is a demo for The Witcher that you can download here.