The Witcher review (PC)

Let’s start, appropriately, with an introduction. Many of you may not have heard of CD Projekt before – it is a Polish company that, since its founding in 1994, has released over 300 fully localised games. Among these are the likes of the Baldur’s Gate series, Planescape: Torment and many other RPGs. The Witcher is its first solo project, based on the fantasy series by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. All of which is to say that the company should know what good writing is, both in games and in fiction. There’s a joke in here about verbs, but as it’s already been done to death, I’ll move on.

The Witcher, then, is the story of Geralt, a professional monster-slayer, and his quest for revenge against the mysterious mage who attacks his fellow witchers’ stronghold in the first few minutes of the game. This is set against the backdrop of a dark and dangerous world, but whose inhabitants’ problems are often mundane enough to create a healthy sense of realism.

There is also a feeling of moral ambiguity about your actions. Geralt is, if anything, an antihero – only partially human and therefore an outcast from the world’s mainly racist human populace – and in many of the choices you have to make throughout the game the path of good or evil is unclear. It doesn’t help that many of the characters you meet along the way are corrupt, devious or outright vile, but this all adds to the game’s well crafted atmosphere.

A Witcher’s Work

This is enhanced by the depth of the game’s lore. The journal is overflowing with information about monsters, places, people (character bios update as you interact with them more) and alchemical ingredients and formulae. Alchemy is an incredibly important part of the game – particularly on the higher difficulty settings – as it allows the brewing of potions to help you survive the many battles you will face. Ingredients can be harvested from plants and taken from the corpses of slain monsters, and can be brewed into potions while in meditation mode. Meditating also allows you to level up by spending talent points on a vast progression tree spanning physical attributes, spell casting and combat styles.

The combat itself is the product of an interesting, if slightly frustrating design choice. While most games of this type follow a simple click to hit formula, The Witcher takes a different approach. Clicking on an enemy initiates an attack, but as this attack ends the cursor lights up. Clicking again will chain attacks together in a deadly combo, with enemies unable to respond. If your click is mistimed however, Geralt falters, giving the opponent a chance to strike back. As blocking is built into this system as well as attack, missing your click can often have dire consequences, and the seeming lack of direct control can cause great frustration, particularly at the beginning of the game when the system is new and somewhat unexpected. In addition to the mechanics, Geralt has three combat styles – strong, fast and group. These are pretty self explanatory, as they refer to the type of enemy you are facing – for every foe there is a style which will give you the greatest advantage, which if you can’t work it out yourself can be found by through the monster entries in the journal.

A faint sense of discomfort

The combat system, while a bit strange, is fairly easy to adjust to. The real problems with The Witcher lie elsewhere, and are twofold. Firstly there is a decided lack of freedom, particularly in the early chapters of the game. For a long time, events are centred in and around the city of Vizima, and feel incredibly plot driven. The Witcher is certainly no Oblivion - there are Bad Guys out there, and you must find them, now. You will not be spending 80 hours riding around on a horse in order to find the best mountain from which to view the sunset. While this focussed approach is not a necessarily a bad idea – particularly when backed up by the quality of writing The Witcher exhibits – the length of time you are forced to spend in each area becomes frustrating, as there is often little in the way of a feeling of progress.

The other issue lies with one of the cornerstones of the RPG experience – the quest for stuff. Loot is integral to practically all RPGs – weapons, armour, magic items – the constant search for something better than you already have. In the Witcher however there’s a pretty basic set of equipment which barely changes throughout the game. Geralt uses two swords – a steel one for fighting humans and a silver one for monsters – and some armour, and that’s about it. There is no longsword+5, no Boots of Speed. Instead you will mainly be collecting ingredients in order to brew potions which will help in the slaying of tougher monsters. It’s strangely circular – Geralt’s motivation for taking jobs is to get paid, but as there’s hardly anything worth spending the money on, it leaves you with a nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right.

Defence against the Dark Arts

These issues are quite subtle however, and neither really break the image of Geralt’s world. One could even pose arguments for their existence, for instance that with so much oppression and poverty around, there wouldn’t be much valuable equipment to obtain, or that Geralt is clearly a single-minded individual and would stop at nothing to complete his quest. Besides, you get the feeling that sunsets aren’t really his thing.

The one aspect that does feel out of place though is the game’s approach to sex. Geralt can basically one-night-stand his way through many of the world’s female NPCs, with the game issuing incredibly tacky “sex cards” of the women in each encounter. I mention this here for completeness – it seems to have been thrown in to ensure a mature rating, and is inconsequential to everything else that takes place.

Aside from this, The Witcher is a solid game and a commendable first solo project, but its release comes at an unfortunate time. With so many high profile titles around at the moment it’s hard to recommend it whole-heartedly, but if you have a PC which can handle it – and the requirements aren’t all that arduous – it is one to strongly consider picking up once the holiday madness has died down.