Time to review the new Witcher!
The story is interesting, even though you would have to be familiar with the previous games to truly appreciate it. This being my first Witcher experience, I had to deduce a lot based on the dialogue and the character bios included in the game, but the story still kept me engaged, and the characters made me care about them. The voice acting and dialogue are top-notch. I absolutely loved the adventures I had in Novigrad with Triss, and, now that I have finished the game, I wish I had asked her to stay with me, but, back then, not doing so seemed the right thing to do. Yes, your choices have consequences, sometimes pretty major ones. This is not quite Life Is Strange, but there is still a lot of paths the story can take, and the amount of effort put into this is to be applauded. What I found very satisfying is that, if you meet some major A-hole in the course of your adventures, be it a mad king, or witches from the dawn of time, you can be sure that, somewhere down the line, you will get a chance to kick their butts in spectacular fashion (provided you make the right choices).
Apart from the main story, the game boasts a ton of side quests, but their number is somewhat misleading, because what pretty much all of them boil down to is tracking down and killing a monster (or some dude). You never get to do something grand and impressive, like you did in the Elder Scrolls or Fallout series.
The combat is fun, with a lot of gore and dismemberment (I find it especially satisfying to cleave someone in half from horseback at full gallop). Apart from your swords, you have access to grenades and a crossbow, as well as rudimentary magic that allows you to knock your foes off their feet, slow them down, set them on fire, or turn them against each other. The game allows you to change your ability set on the fly, making it easy to adapt to different types of enemies. Your abilities, however, are only part of victory; your gear and magical potions make a huge difference, too. The best gear and potions have to be crafted, and for that you will have to first find the recipe, and then hunt down the ingredients. I am not a big fan of crafting (I never even tried alchemy in Skyrim), but in this game I found it surprisingly fun — largely, I think, because it is quite simple. It may take a while to gather all the ingredients of a potion, but, once brewed, it will be replenished automatically, as long as you have some alcohol in your inventory. Since the right oil or potion can give you a serious edge in battle, the effort is more than worth it, and the same goes for armor and weapons. The best gear that can be crafted is specialized witcher gear that can be upgraded several times, each upgrade changing its appearance. Believe me, all the hard work will pay off the moment you see how cool your new armor looks.
As for the graphics, I have mixed feelings. On the whole, they are quite decent, if not jaw-dropping, and the lighting and weather effects are probably the best I have ever seen in a video game (if you like watching sunsets, you will not be disappointed). However, the water looks very crude and unrealistic, and that is a pretty major flaw, considering how much of the game's world it occupies. Speaking of the world, it is, admittedly, huge ( it is supposed to be 20% bigger than Skyrim, and I can believe that), but, like the quests, there is little variety to it; most of it is woods, swamps, or mountains, broken up by bodies of water. Pretty much all new locations are simply groups of monsters or bandits, usually guarding some loot in the middle of nowhere. There are a lot of small settlements that all look alike, and only two real cities, although the latter are bigger and more real-looking than any city in Skyrim, and the world is seamless, so you don't have to look at a loading screen every time you enter or exit a city (even though you do when you travel from one part of the world to another).
I cannot say much about the soundtrack except that it is very good.
The game has its share of annoying glitches. Quite often you have to wait several seconds after you approach an NPC for them to become available for interaction. If there is candle or torch next to an object or NPC, you will keep interacting with the former instead of the latter (this is supposed to have been fixed, but, in reality, it has not been). The bodies of fallen enemies have no substance, that is, you can walk right through them. When you call your horse, it appears some distance away and is so bad at finding its way to you, it is simpler to just run toward it yourself. The most annoying things, however, are not glitches so much as results of a lack of effort. First, most of the NPCs are clones, and I am not talking about the crowds, but the ones you actually interact with. Very often you will strike up a conversation with some guy and be like, “But, dude, I just did a quest for you ten minutes ago, except you wore a slightly different beard!” Second, plate armor behaves like cloth, bending and twisting with the characters' movements. These two things seriously ruin the immersion. Another annoying thing is that, in big cities, the icons for traders and suchlike only appear on the map when you are close to them; I guess the idea was not to clutter the map too much, but, in practice, it results in time spent looking for what you need that might have been easily saved.
Verdict: the game is not the masterpiece some people proclaim it to be, and it does not deserve the 10/10 rating that Gamespot has awarded it, but is very solid, nonetheless, and definitely deserves a discerning gamer's attention.
Also, boobs.