The Witcher (PC DVD)

Well I must admit I'm out of condition. I've become so used to the 8-16 hour long games that are the norm these days that an 80 hour monster like this all but broke me. I swear I can't remember spending so much time on a game since FF VII or Baldur's Gate. Now a lot of that could be down to my obsessive desire to finish every quest, but more on that later.Melee combat is simplistic and doesn't get much better as you progress. The problem is all you do is hit the left mouse button at the right time and Geralt launches into increasingly complicated attack patterns, which really are a treat, but once he's done you just click again. There is a certain amount of tactics involved in picking the correct style and even which sword you're going to use but it's still pretty shallow. Looks great though.Similarly magic has 5 signs which equate to 5 spells that you level up and attach special abilities to. But ultimately magic is all about selecting your sign and hitting the right hand mouse button. ie while the level 1 air spell may stun, the level 2 air spell may have a higher chance of knockdown as well (this is an example and not 100% accurate!), which is fine except you JUST want stun and knockdown defeats the purpose of stun which is to get an easy melee kill. But you can't slay your opponent if you have to run across the room to get to them. So, like combat, once a spell is upgraded you either use it or don't and chances are you'll be using the fire spell all the way once you get it, or the lower level air spell (it becomes LESS effective as you upgrade it, IMO).I'll not go into the details of the story but suffice to say that it's not your average RPG fairy tale nonsense. If HBO made RPGs this is the RPG they'd make. I loved it and it honestly opened my eyes as to what storylines should be.Now. The quests. I have an obsessive mental condition that means I have to finish every quest given to me and ideally I have to finish it perfectly. This game nearly melted my brain in that respect because people die, backs are stabbed and some people just plain lie to you! I finished the game with about 8 or 9 open quests and a dozen others that I passed but felt like I'd failed. Every bad decision you made in the game gets thrown back in your face at the end, somewhat similarly to the Fallouts although less newsreel-y and more tirade-y. This is a good thing and means decisions have consequences. Most games let you either play as an angel or a jerk right the way through to the end and then decide if you're going to be saviour or destroyer at the least moment. None of that here, and good luck even trying to play as a "good guy" right the way through.Overall the combat/magic is simple but functional, the story is top rate and the only real downside is stability. Patch 1.2 has reduced loading and save times to trivial levels (loadtimes were a genuine gripe at launch) but I haven't had a game crash on me so much for ages since patching. It's almost like another of those impossible in-game decisions. Don't patch and suffer the loadtimes or patch and be sure to save after every major decision or risk losing all your progress.Plenty of people are experiencing no problems and I suspect that if I had lowered my graphical settings it would have been more stable for me.

I thouroughly enjoyed the game from start to finish. I'm on my second way through it as I type. Graphics wise it uses the NWN2 game engine and it's worked well again here. At 1680 x 1050 the detail is astounding, particularly with all the bells and whistles enabled - it really is very pretty to look at. The interface is pretty intuitive and easy to get to grips with. The gameplay is involving and always seems to throw up something else to keep you interested. It's all very nicely voice acted and very immersive - it's easily the sort of game you can start to play for an hour before bedtime and end up turning up late for work, red-eyed, unshaven and unslept the next day. It does this remarkably well actually...However. Vista users beware, particularly Vista users with Nvidia cards and chipsets. It is nigh on impossible to get this to run under vista with any degree of stability whatsoever. I ended up dual booting as it got that frustrating (Goes to show how good the game is though!) Under Vista I was getting a crash to desktop without fail at least once every 30 mins, under Xp I've crashed once in over 30 hours of play. Something about this games does not like Vista, there seems to be a few fixes floating round according to the official forums but they did not work for me. The 1.2 patch helped a little but in the end I resorted back to good 'ol trusty XP to run it properly.Aside from that it's a corker of a game. It has it bugs and quirks - like the amount of sheer walking involved, dodgy camera angles at times during combat etc, but all in all its well worth the £18.00. Enjoy.System specsIntel C2D E6600 @ 3.0Ghz4Gb RamXP Pro Sp22x Nvidia 8800GT's in SLi.

This is Version 1 of the game which comes with DRM protection which is incompatible with most versions of Windows after XP. I did manage to get the game working, but only after a couple of fraught hours searching with Google and trying one thing after another... To get it up and running I had to download a 1.4 upgrade file and also an English language pack (place both these in the same folder before running the upgrade), and then install the 1.5 upgrade which removes the DRM. It also removes the need to use the authorisation code as far as I can tell. Once up and running the game is pretty much as described in other reviews. Considering when this was released it is quite remarkable.

If you have not yet played this game i would really recommend buying it, although it is quite a mature suject the main plot about terrorist/freedom fighters is handled very well i would however recdommend getting a proper gaming keyboard as after the mass amounts of hrs you will play this game hand strain is a very real problem

Really enjoying this game and I dont usually enjoy RPGs. The main and subsidiary characters are believable and have an authentic feel. The graphics form a really absorbing and enjoyable environment. I especially like the almost FPS feel of the game using the over the shoulder camera angle. A bargain.

One of the best RPG games I've ever played. Good graphics, excellent storyline, tough choices and interesting characters. If you love RPG games it's a must.

Great game

Great game, put your game code into GOG.com and get the enchanced edition patched to work on later OS