The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Review
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Character System and Interface You always play as Geralt in The Witcher 2, a monster-hunting mutated human known as a witcher. There's no character creation - instead, you jump right in to the game and develop Geralt as you play. The fact that he is a witcher limits your choices somewhat. Realistically you can only fight with the traditional steel and silver swords. Geralt is always capable of using magic in the form of five signs, including casting a magic shield or powerful knock-down spells.
Within those limits, there is some flexibility in how you develop and equip Geralt. You'll run into a variety of equipment and diagrams to craft new equipment. The crafting system is pretty straightforward, once you have a diagram you can craft consumables (bombs and potions) yourself through the meditation screen, while weaponry and the different pieces of armor (body, hands, legs and feet) also need diagrams but can only be crafted by professionals you meet in every town. High-level weaponry and armor can be further customized with upgrades and runes. With the exception of junk, pretty much everything you can pick up in the game is an ingredient for crafting one item or another. It's a joy for a hoarder like me, though it's easy to get overloaded as The Witcher 2 does not offer relief in the way of storage points, and some of the crafting ingredients, like ore or timber, are very heavy. Of course, crafting isn't the only way to get items, and you will find rather than create some of the best equipment. The available equipment is fairly varied, but the range of bonuses available are a bit restricted to the likes of bleeding effects, and the more unique bonuses - like causing freezing effects or providing a bonus against specific enemies - only become available near the end.
The character system consists of abilities, attributes and talents. Abilities are gained by doing specific things in the game, like carrying an NPC to safety or using the riposte move numerous times. It is a good perk system though unfortunately CD Projekt opted to put the conversation skills (using an Axii hex, intimidation and persuasion) under here. This means that if you use them a few times early on you'll push them to their highest value and always succeed at them later. Attributes are passive stats derived from equipment, abilities and talents. The talent trees are the only ones you can upgrade during the game, which is a bit restrictive but works well.
There are four talent trees: training, alchemy, magic and swordmanship. Training is a kind of (basic) talent tree, and you have to invest six points into it before the game allows you to invest in any other tree. The other trees are specializations in the branch they're named after, each invested point unlocking a noticeable boost to your abilities or unlocking a whole new ability like knife-throwing or riposte. The game never locks a talent tree so you can freely generalize in multiple trees. Each one branches a few times so you can opt to skip a number of talents you have less interest in while working your way up to the best talents. Geralt gains levels by accumulating experience, most of which is given to you by resolving quests (mostly main quests), while enemies give minimal XP and even nothing if they're way below your level. This is not a game that encourages much in the way of grinding, and on my second playthrough I reached level 35 (the cap) without doing any of it.
The system is pretty flexible and specializing in any of the branches seems a pretty valid way to go, though I did not test a pure-alchemy build in my two full playthroughs, but considering the power of bombs in key fights it seems like a good way to go. In both of my full playthroughs, I supported my main specialization (swordsmanship and magic) with a choice of low-level skills from other branches, and again it works great. The game does encourage you to push at least one branch to the top, as the top abilities grant powerful adrenaline abilities. They allow Geralt to charge adrenaline by certain actions specific to their specialization (using signs, or hitting with your sword, or being poisoned by potions), which once charged up can be used for powerful moves, like instant-finishers or slowing down time, which make some of the tougher fights a lot easier. But the balance between talents isn't great, which I'll discuss later.
While we're on talents and crafting, it's worth taking a moment to talk about the game's interface. The Witcher 2 is console-friendly relative to the first Witcher game. The camera is always stuck in an OTS view with no options to zoom out, and the interface screens for selecting signs or items to use are easily adapted to console. It's not too blatant and still works fine on PC, though the camera is a bit of a pity, as the combat could have done with a top-down overview but the targeting system doesn't really allow for it. One odd design decision here is that because you can only level up and drink potions outside of combat which is fine they put both actions under the meditate screen, which is a bit annoying. The frequent act of selecting and drinking potions becomes more awkward than it needs to be, as I need to perform multiple actions and watch Geralt go through repetitive motions every time I do so.
One final bit I'll list under miscellaneous are the mini-games. There is arm wrestling, playing dice or fist-fighting, and one-off mini-games like aiming a ballista or a knife-throwing competition. These mini-games are often a part of sidequests but there is only one occasion of fist-fighting being needed in the main plot, so if you don't enjoy them they're easy to skip. The dice game is the same as in the last game, the AI playing pretty well so you have decent odds of winning or losing. Arm wrestling consists of you holding an emblem with a moving field with mouse movements, which is generally pretty easy. Fist-fighting is the worst of the mini-games, being a quick-time event where you press the WASD buttons when it tells you to and then watch Geralt beat up his opponent. It's is very hard to lose these fights and the QTE system means you feel removed from the action. Nor is it the only instance of QTE in the game, as various bosses require bits of QTE to be defeated. These are mostly unfortunate and feel unnecessary, but can easily be turned down by turning off (difficult QTEs) in the options. Still, the whole QTE thing feels tacked on, like something they felt obligated to add, but which serves very little purpose in this game.
