It was with the anticipation of a particularly giddy child that I finally got around to invest in a game of which I had heard so much good that I half expected it to leap out of the case to hand me a beer and perform grade-a fellatio with a John Williams orchestra booming in the background. The game is of course The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.
Sadly, as with most Saturday nights when you're of the portly variety the fellatio remained absent and the beer was bought with hard my earned cashy money.
The game (Enhanced Edition even) came with a fancy looking map and an adventure book that I never got around to read, which is sad given how many hours I've spent lamenting the loss of big fat game manuals.
When the admittedly awesome opening CGI finally ended and the game's orchestral theme kicked into high gear I thought for the tiniest of moments that I had found something so very special. Like a girlfriend who was neither insane nor ugly. "Ha! Fat chance", the gamer-fairy snorted. The game started for reals, straight into the most convoluted and badly designed tutorial I have played in years. The inventory system is ugly and unintuitive, and the world boring and drab. Sadly, tutorials tend to be front-loaded and hideous mutations of otherwise decent gameplay so I decided to soldier on through the festivities of shit, hoping to emerge from what can best be likened to fleeing a New Delhi public bathroom to find the Taj Mahal just down the street.
Then the game started for real. If you've never played the game, let me be sum it up for you. You play as Geralt of Rivia, a particularly scarred monster hunter with a bad case of amnesia and an uncanny ability to be in the wrong damn place at the wrong damn time. It's like the bastard child of Raiden from Metal Gear and Bruce Willis from every movie he's ever done got beaten over the head every day with the encyclopedia of shitty fantasy writing until parts of it inevitably got smacked into his soft squishy brain where it slowly grew into infectious tumors.
This time, Bruce Raiden finds himself working for king I-dont-care-what-your-name-is-since-you're-obviously-just-here-to-die, or Melvin for short.
You're in the middle of a war, leading the assault and then lo and behold, every obvious thing that can happen does happen. Let me underline this for you. You start the game charging into battle, storming a castle when a frigging dragon appears and starts destroying shit for everyone, and in the middle of this huge battle King can't-keep-it-in-my-pants gets brutally assassinated (the title spoils this more than I just did, so shut your yappers!) and stereotype main character 4B gets blamed for it. Que hilarity. Sounds exciting? Well it isn't! From the awkward combat, to the horrible stealth and just plain awful design the whole thing plays as a horribly drawn out bad fantasy tv-show. Or something you might find on youtube when you've already seen all the good shows but is too bored to turn on the tv or have a wank.
The game quickly hits its stride as an ugly, broken romp through a decidedly boring world that desperately tries to pass itself of as mature. While it DOES do a better job at that than most games, seeing as cussing and blood is usually all that is needed to slap the mature label on some idle box, it's hardly enough. The story, while engaging on paper, just falls flat and ends up as a boring pastiche of tired fantasy cliche. It's boring, it's bland and I just couldn't give a damn about any of these characters. Even the hot and occasionally fully nude redhead not-girlfriend fails to capture my interest. Yes, those certainly ARE fully animated breasts, now put them away so we can go kill something. My first play-through can be surmised as this; "This game is shit! Oh wait, **** Better give it a second chance. This game is shit!"
Let me talk a moment about the world, seeing as this game advertises itself as having a vast and expansive world, it's only fair to take a peek at it.
The game world is drab and ugly. There, I said it. It doesn't come across as particularly gritty or tough, it's just an ugly, uninspired mess of monsters and horribly designed environments. If it was up to me I'd have the whole environment design crew of this game publicly flogged and then rolled in Tabasco sauce.
Besides being utterly and immensely boring, the biggest gripe I have with the game is that it's broken! The horribly designed menus and maps make the simple task of restocking your inventory or finding a specific quest giver or person of interest an incredibly difficult process. Whoever tested the inventory system and gave it a thumbs-up should have those thumbs chopped of and reattached to their ass, before being put on a diet of prunes and laxatives.
Add to all this the fact that characters keep clipping in and out of the environment or constantly get stuck on door frames you know you're playing a game that never quite came together.
The Witcher 2 is a loose and clumsy attempt to make a great game, and while I applaud the attempt made, I do so with the same sincerity I muster when shown a kids doodle to hang on my fridge. The game comes across as unfinished, uninspired and incredibly over-rated!
Nothing works the way it should, everything is more or less broken.
I have never been this disappointed in a game in my life, and I've played Duke Nukem Forever.
My advice? Save your money, if you want the Witcher experience try watching Legend of the Seeker or some shit of that sort with every character replaced by a wooden doll with either **** or a bad accent. Throw in a white wig on the main character and watch on a laggy internet connection while occasionally beating yourself over the head with the remote controller, pausing now and then to squeeze fresh lemons into your eyes. There, I just saved you the torment of enduring this shitfest of a game.You're welcome!