The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Reviews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on June 4th, 2011

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When the combat is hard, it's primarily for usability reasons. Once you're allowed to fix it through new talents, it becomes almost trivial. It's reasonably satisfying to watch, and spells, bombs and traps add some worthwhile twists, but for an RPG that doesn't let you choose a class, it's conspicuous that the one you're stuck with never really gets interesting.

The game has trouble determining exactly when combat has ended, and you can't interact with anything until it has. Every fight is followed by an awkward five seconds in which doors won't open, bodies can't be looted, quest objectives can't be completed, and the game can't be saved. When the door in question is to a burning building, and the objective is to rescue the innocents inside, the irritation becomes an absurdity.

One reason you can't perform any of these actions during combat is the game's needless insistence on using the left mouse button for almost every interaction. It relies heavily on context-sensitivity, which would be inadequate even if it had been implemented well. Instead, it becomes almost impossible to search bodies when companions you can talk to are following close by, you're forever lighting torches instead of performing critical actions, and left-clicking a bound hostage in a burning building can cause you to descend a ladder into the inferno.

Whilst not a huge sprawling affair like Oblivion and other RPG's it nails everything it aims to do, making it a joy to experience and play. The Witcher 2 successfully bridges a gap between PC and console games with an accessible control system that is perfectly suited for a game controller and graphics that a console gamer would die for; could this be the game that makes gamers return to their PC's? Only time will tell, none the less, this is a must have purchase even if you have a minimum spec PC.

The Witcher 2 offers a wide assortment of things to do. Secondary quests will gladly take hours of time away from the main storyline. There are a few consistent ones in the form of arm wrestling and hunting. Alongside those however, are various quests from exorcising haunted mansions. Searching for long lost treasures, and even playing mediator during a murder investigation. These side-quests are usually interesting, and not just some boring throw away fetch quest.

Geralt will even have to gain knowledge of his prey via books or through combat. So that he can properly understand how to deal with the task he's been given. He'll discover that he has to blow up tunnels with specially made bombs, or set traps for beasts to take back to their nests. Geralt can even find schematics for weapons, armor, and alchemy. Which taps into the vast skill tree that opens during his journey.

The Witcher 2, spreads that nostalgic feeling of an old-time RPG. Before games limited you from taking everything you can pilfer in someone's house. Geralt is rarely restricted in where he can explore, and each location offers some new forest or dungeon. It's hard to say that players would grow bored of a location. The level design variety is at its peak in The Witcher 2, players can spend hours engrossed in quest after quest.

Here goes. The first fight you encounter is fine as you will be fighting alongside around 10 allied soldiers, soon after you're sent to capture a ballista in order to breach a defensive position. This is where you're sent into a solo fight with 3 soldiers and behind them are another 6 (or so) soldiers with shields, crossbows and you'll likely die several times.

By this point, the game should've taken some time to explain how to do well in combat, I'm sure the very first fight was intended to give you time to get used to fighting but in order to learn the controls for the game and the actions you take it is necessary either to go into your journal, select the tutorials section and read the combat basics or to quit the game to look at the controls. That's right, you cannot change the games controls within the game, nor can you look at those controls without restarting it.

In addition to this, the movement controls in combat can be painfully unresponsive, I'll attempt to try and manoeuvre away from a cluster of enemies only to get hit by them in the over 1 second it takes for Geralt to even respond to my movement attempt. This is further compounded by the seemingly random target selection system that will frequently decide that I no longer want to attack the monster right in front of me, instead launching Geralt at the monster just behind your current opponent Putting you right into the middle of the cluster. The game has several difficulty spikes and eventually I just gave up and brought the difficulty down from normal to easy I'd already quit out once due to the frustration caused by the above.

I said that Assassins of Kings had an unconventional PC RPG storyline, and it does. It's also not nearly as smart or mature as it likes to think it is. As in the comically dark Dragon Age 2, The Witcher 2 throws around a lot of weighty subject matter. Surprisingly, The Witcher 2 doesn't use rape, torture, and bizarre cruelty as willfully (or as ineffectively) as Bioware does, or even as The Witcher did. For the most part, the game manages to maintain its serious, depressed tone by implication, rather than through tawdry action.

Unfortunately, the designers of The Witcher 2 felt that the best way to render any plot-important woman was with peculiarly medieval, revealing clothing. The game hypersexualizes women in a way that isn't necessarily surprising; most mainstream games treat women this way, and The Witcher certainly followed suit. This approach is nonetheless disappointing. While the original Witcher's childish collectible sex cards (every time Geralt had sex with a woman the player would receive a card depicting said woman in some kind of soft-core glory) are nowhere to be seen, Geralt can still have sex with several women. These scenes are animated with painstaking detail, and while they are never as robotic and horrifying as the sex scenes in Bioware games, they're still terribly unsexy.

I don't fault the game its virulently sexist, violent world, I just think that it takes just a little bit too much pleasure in depicting certain parts of that world. Likewise, I appreciate that Geralt isn't another middle class liberal Bioware hero; I always play Geralt as a champion of (non)human rights, of equality between different sexes and classes (though the writing can get in the way of this from time to time). The fact that I can do this in a world that feels even remotely plausible from a political and social perspective means a lot to me and informed my experience with the game accordingly.

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