The Witcher 2 is a game you desperately want to love (or at least LUST AFTER) -- if only it would let you...
I should start by prefacing this review: I've just finished my fourth Skyrim playthrough, and I'm working my way through the Mass Effect series for a 4th time in its entirety. I've also just finished a Nightmare run on Diablo III as I come to this review, so with that as a basis, and if you've enjoyed those games or series as well, perhaps you'll understand my expectations for TWII:EE
I should also say that CDProjekt Red is to be commended for its player-friendly stance on DRM, and for the obviously intense commitment it has to this "universe" and the details and nuances of it.
But where to begin the review? Well, The Witcher was a PC game, in my opinion, full of POTENTIAL brilliance but marred by its overly complex control scheme and terribly inept combat system. The Witcher 2 seems to have rectified the combat issue substantially, but its problems lie more with its attempted grandiosity rather than its direct gameplay.
With that out of the way, on with the show:
1. GRAPHICS (7.5/10) -- Truth be told, I'm surprised at the INTENSE hype surrounding the console visuals. Every site played it up like the only major deficiencies were lighting oriented. THEY ARE NOT. There is lots of pop-in, terrible geometry clipping, the game is dark on all but the very highest gamma setting, and it makes it incredibly difficult to actually see where you're going in places. The character models aren't really unique outside of the main adventuring group, and outside of Geralt they don't change AT ALL. Enemy diversity is somewhat commendable, but outside of the Endrega, everything is kind of a palette swap. The trolls remind me of both the Bullvores the Draug; the wraiths are all incredibly similar, the nekkers and rotfiends are hard to distinguish, etc. To be quite honest, the environments are all very flat. The color pallette settles into some stoney grays, mottled browns, and a few vivid greens early on and never relents outside of some of the character models. The graphics are nice, and the sword-fighting animations are incredibly fluid, but outside of that, the running and hopping, etc. is just par-for-the-course.
2. GAMEPLAY (8/10) -- I played two full playthroughs -- one sword and one magic. Neither were especially fulfilling. The lock-on system on consoles is totally broken; the 'momentum' you experience in swordfights is often misleading -- there is no sense of real give-and-take action. It's completely proactive on your part. You want to block an attack, you better start block three seconds before the enemy winds up -- period. And hit detection is drastically flawed BECAUSE of the lock-on system. If you are locked onto an enemy at a distance, it's often impossible to hit an enemy IMMEDIATELY in front of you (unless you take a certain perk from the Swordsman's tree that distributes damage equally to enemies in your vicinity).
The magic system is counterintuitive in many instances. Certain spells you would expect to be quite helpful offer little (or far too much) impact. A good example is how a level 1 trap sign can essentially stun a BULLVORE (even on Dark difficulty) to be killed with perhaps five heavy attacks. Yet the same sign will often barely halt a nekker. The menu and item tags overlap horribly, often putting multiple items into multiple menus for no good reason. I could go on and on, but it's just broken, in my opinion. And don't even get me started on how unnecessary "Meditation" is. It's useless. It does nothing but add two more menu screens to a circumstance that could be handled by allowing you to quaff potions on the fly from another inventory screen.
STORY (7/10): So many folks have pointed to the story as being full of "political intrigue" and "depth." Sorry, folks, all I see here is another amnesiac-hero narrative with a few doggystyle cutscenes thrown in for good measure. The narrative is GROSSLY disjointed. The prologue does a pretty excellent job bringing you up to speed, but then you spend ACT 1 essentially trapped in a backwater with NO narrative direction except for the last 10 minutes of the act after you slay the Kayran. It does little to nothing to establish EITHER of the main antagonists for the rest of the story -- you have no real idea what drives Roche other than "...the king is dead we must avenge him" yet he's consistently played up as an individual cares very little for honor at all and simply cares about the mission. Iorveth, on the other hand, is your run-of-the-mill disenfranchised-elf-who-wants-to-be-terrorist. It's really that simple. Triss and your companions are given no backstory exposition that would help fill in the gaps in your knowledge about the gameworld, and the expectation is that you'll spend hours digging through the game's somewhat extensive menus to get up-to-speed on the lore. A perfect example of how the game just totally misses the narrative boat is near the end of the second act when the king's forces attack and Saskia's rebels are on the defense. A character is mentioned during the ending sequences "Dethmold." And it's implied that he committed horrific war crimes, obviously many characters know this, and his sought-after death becomes one of the driving factors for the peace treaty -- yet he is literally only mentioned in game ONCE that I can recall, before he is beheaded. Once this happens, you realize he's the king's sorcerer, but before that it's terribly unclear.
The ultimate problem here is that the narrative has no cohesion, and each act feels like a standalone adventure with only a loosely bound reason-for-being.
OVERALL (7.5/10).
I just want to say in closing, this is one of those games that gives you the feeling that if you had been well "prepared" for it, it would have been phenomenal. But this lore is obviously deep, and the game is OBVIOUSLY a love-letter from fans of the novels to gamers who may have enjoyed them or who absolutely LOVED the ambience and setting of the first game. To me, though, it's really just a generic knock-off of many other fantasy worlds with the same tropes and ideas flitting about. The gameplay is mediocre at best, and the graphics are what they are (good but never great). If you were a fan of the first game, and you know the full backstory, then you'll probably LOVE this game. You'll probably also appreciate some of the revamped combat options. It plays MUCH better with a controller. The dialogue IS exceptional, and the characters ARE well written, but the narrative drags the whole thing down immensely. And since the leveling and loot systems just aren't rewarding on their own (like, say, Diablo or KoA: Reckoning), there just isn't much to hold you to the fire.
Like I said, I sincerely wanted to love this game: it's like the dude or lady at the bar you take home at last call. It's a wonderful experience for five or six hours, until you sleep on it for a bit, and then wake up to see the mess you've gotten yourself into.