Ok! I have finally given in to the temptation and have created a blog. Go me, giving in to yet another popular move. Ah well, move with the times and all that.
Anyway, I started this blog with the intention of writing about the game industry, my opinions on such things, maybe a review of a game or two depending on what I feel like. The idea of which is to force me to continue reading about the game industry in general, record my thoughts on it and critically analyse various games I'm playing or have played.
I should set up a schedule now shouldn't I. I mean that's what these full time bloggers do, a certain post on a certain day and all that jazz. This feels very weird, talking to myself, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. How about a game review sometime in the first week of each month and some other random article or opinion sometime for each of the other three weeks. There that's good enough now until I get the hang of this.
So since this is the first week of June (just) it's a game review. And I suppose it's good timing since I'm kind of between games at the moment having finished Witcher 2 and not having any new games to review. So it only makes sense to review Witcher 2.
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past six months or so, you will have heard about the Polish game Witcher 2, sequel to Witcher 1 (duh) and based on the Wiedzmin book series by Andrzej Sapkowski, though only two of them have been translated into English.
ANYWAY! There might be a couple of minor spoilers but nothing major story wise, I promise!
Witcher 2 is an action/adventure role-playing game in which every decision you make affects how the story plays out. It's shorter than the first game, only three chapters instead of five and personally that was a bit of a disappointment, but more into that later. There's a lot changed from the first game; the combat has changed, the way skills are developed is different, even the side quests take on a different and more realistic feel.
First, the combat. Now when I play a game I'm usually more interested in the story than anything else so I'm not too worried about the other elements. Nonetheless, I do like a little challenge so I started playing the game on normal difficulty. Well. After dying five times on the first real combat I flicked it back to easy and occasionally still had to think about the combat. Gone was the timing clicks, and now it's more twitch combat and strategy with planning before battle. The problem with playing it on easy is some of the boss battles can be a little dull (for example there's a scene where the witcher is running from a dragon which is supposed to be a quick time event, except on easy there is no quick time event, you're just running in a straight line. Boring). As the game continues and points are put into the various tree branches (I went with swordsmanship) the game gets easier and easier to the point where, again, combat is boring. In the last chapter the combat was so easy I doubted there was anything I couldn't do so I decided to challenge it. There is a 'room' that is literally full of guards who hate me. So what did I do? Go in there and pick a fight by throwing a bomb into the middle of them. Yeah, that'll teach them for picking on a witcher. I probably killed between 20 and 30 of them before I was eventually killed. I tried about three times and didn't succeed with any of them but I'm not very good at thinking on my feet during combat so someone who is better at the combat could probably do it. Apart from that, there was not a battle I even had trouble with. Next play through I'll persevere with normal and hope that it gets better.
Ok side quests. In the first Witcher there was a plethora of side quests, most of which consisting of go there, kill that, get this from the body and bring it back, and don't forget to read the book about the monster first. It was repetitive but I like to complete every side quest before doing the main quests so I did every single one. With Witcher 2 there were a lot less side quests and they were quite different from the simple grinding style. For example, there are two 'witcher' quests in the first chapter but you need to act as a proper witcher would in order to complete them. For example, as with the first game, you had to find a book about the monster to learn about them. Then, for one of the monster infestations, just killing them wasn't enough as they already returned. You had to find their nests (that are not marked on the map) and figure out a way to destroy them, which you're not told. True witcher work!
Finally the length. As I said earlier the game felt quite short especially when compared to the last one. The game boasted 40 hours of game play, excluding side quests. This may have been true on normal with dying often and restarting (especially if you forget to save as autosave wasn't that often), but I finished the game in two or three days, and I don't play constantly all day every day as some gamers do. This was disappointing since the first game took me a couple weeks to complete and even then there were some side quests I stuffed up and didn't complete. However, I did feel it finished properly. There were essentially two story lines throughout the game, finding the assassin of kings and why he's killing royalty, along with a more personal quest in regaining Geralt's memories. The memories quest line didn't finish, leaving it open for a sequel, but it did round off nicely, like the end of a chapter :)
Ok it's getting late so I'm going to have to wrap up. Over all I was happy with the game and it was a satisfying play, if a short one.
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