Review of the Witcher

The Witcher is a fairly basic third person RPG with everything you’d ever expect from this genre. It’s funny how this year I can’t really remember any good RPG’s, it’s been all about shooters: Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty 4, Gears of War, Portal and more.

So The Witcher came out at a very good time for RPG fans. You might be screaming at the screen right now something like “Hey, you butt, what about Mass Effect?”. And I’d have to agree with you. While Mass Effect is a 360-only exclusive, the Witcher is a PC-only game.

In reality, The Witcher is a sequel to games I’ve never played or heard about. That makes me lame, doesn’t it? Apparently, the developers wanted new, casual players to seamlessly get into the whole theme and the story is that you get amnesia, and need to remember everything. I think this works pretty well, as I had no idea what the universe of that game was all about.

I’m not going to get into any details here, but you are this dude that walks around killing other dudes and monsters. The world is pretty big — not like Oblivion though — but you’ll have fun playing it. The story, while it isn’t all that engaging, doesn’t stand in the way or frustrate you too much and let’s you go further.

Gameplay-wise, this is as standard as it gets - and that’s not really a bad thing. There are couple of tweaks though, like being able to switch views for combat instances, but nothing too special.

The deal with this game is that it came out at the right time - at the year that had no good PC RPG’s, ultimately making it a sure hit. I, as a fan of Oblivion (and I’ve already played the hell out of that game), was very pleased and got my itch for a good role-playing game softened this year.

While it’s not anything special, I think it’s a definite rental if you want a solid (if somewhat forgettable), entertaining role-playing experience on the PC.