From Poland with pale, gothy love — The Witcher, reviewed

Yes, I realize how late I am on this game, but I don’t care and this was a fun review to write. So, without any introduction at all, here we go.

Translation is a notorious stumbling block for foreign-made games, but The Witcher does a refreshingly good job of making the change. Longer conversations don’t seem to flow all that well, especially when you’re given a dialogue option, and there are a couple of head-scratching moments of simple mistranslation, but the dialogue and voice acting are well above average, with a couple of moments that I thought were pretty funny. (Other character: “I can’t believe you outdrank me!” Geralt, sounding utterly miserable: “It wasn’t easy.”)

The character-building was, well, pretty good. It’s a point system, but it’s dolled up with various grades of points (bronze, silver, and gold talents, to be precise) and a more harmonious, well-thought-out system in which to spend them. You can upgrade Geralt’s base attributes, his knowledge of magic “signs”, and his sword skills.

The only drawback is that there are still a few blah skills in there. The group styles of swordplay seemed unnecessary to me, because any foe that you could actually kill with it wasn’t really worth bothering about anyway, and the game never really requires you to use it at all, by, say, swamping you with a bunch of tough monsters that you have to keep at bay all at once. Don’t get me wrong, killing off six and seven drowners – the game’s basic enemy peon – at a stroke was pretty cool, but there really isn’t any need for it; you could just pump points into the fast and strong styles and be able to handle anything that comes your way, which is what I did very early on.

This worked well: In fact, the combat got startlingly easy, barring the odd total brainfart like drawing the wrong kind of sword for my opponent. (Geralt uses a silver sword on paranormal or magical beasties, and, less frequently, a steel one to hew limbs from ordinary beasts or humans.) Once I killed a tough-looking boss without getting hit once, I realized that I completely outclassed any possible opposition, which took a little of the excitement out of combat, though, to be fair, I haven’t played through the game on its harder mode. The upshot of the character building and combat: It’s fun, and it looks pretty good, but about as hard as a chocolate anvil.

But that’s a minor quibble. The point is that the fighting is a bit easy, and pumping up the difficulty – which eliminates the visual cue for when to click again – doesn’t really solve the core issue. (Especially once you’ve played through it once: “Yay! Beating these low-level enemies is now much harder!”) But, hey, the fighting looks cool, and it’s not a large enough problem to turn me off of the game.

That aside, the game gets fairly involved in other respects. Part of this is due to the actual role-playing that you get to do on Geralt’s behalf. Nine times out of ten, action RPGs have some kind of morality meter, in deference to which many interactions have clear-cut “good” and “bad” choices. Not so in The Witcher. You can be as good or as bad as you want to be, and while it won’t be tracked on anything available to you, there will certainly be consequences. Characters won’t deal with you if you screw them over. Others will take advantage of you if you’re nice to them. Piquing the player’s sense of injustice or guilt is a much better way to suck people into the experience than having them help granny across the street to gain actual brownie points.

Unless they were an alchemical ingredient. Then you’d be hustling old ladies across the street in tour groups. The alchemy system, whereby Geralt can brew potions, create oils for his blades, and even make bombs, is a terrific addition that will draw you still further into the Witcherverse. It’s one of a few mini-games in The Witcher. The others are things like rudimentary bar brawling and drinking contests, neither of which are particularly notable. But the alchemy is one of those perfect mini-games, like chocobo breeding in FF7, that is just complicated enough to be engaging and not too complicated to detract from the rest of the game. Plus, like all good minigames, it has direct effects on the game world. The documentation warns you that, on harder difficulties, alchemy is “required” to survive many fights. The potions and such that Geralt creates are mightily handy, ranging from standard healing stuff to powerful draughts that give you permanent ability boosts.

Also, Geralt, unlike almost every other video game character ever, has sex. A lot of sex, if you like. There are a lot of swelling virtual bosoms in the Witcherverse, and Geralt of Rivia is not indifferent to them. Thankfully, we’re still well on the left side of the Uncanny Valley here, and there’s nothing particularly explicit, but it’s still relatively edgy for a video game to be clearly indicating that characters have sex. Maybe this is why Geralt keeps saying that he’s immune to infectious disease: He’s trying to reassure potential mates that he doesn’t have the gothic clap or anything.

And the game really does have a goth feel to it. Nothing outrageous – Geralt is not introspective enough to get all whiny and emo, except for a couple of groan-inducing occasions – but there’s a certain “dark night of the soul” gothery about the setting. It’s dark, it’s atmospheric and it certainly beats the hell out of the standard faeries-and-dragons crapola, but those with a low tolerance for brooding loners struggling with their violent nature – and getting called (cringe, brace for lawsuit) “white wolf” from time to time – should be warned.

But my most serious issue with The Witcher is that the storyline is a massive disappointment. It starts out so promisingly: Ok, amnesia, give us a break, but the characters around Geralt are interesting, and, at least at first, it manages to insert a little self-directed side-questing into a mysterious, multifaceted plot. We learn a little more, we get more of the themes of moral choice and deceit that are supposed to be central to the game, and meet a couple more memorable characters. Right about at the beginning of Chapter III, however, the writers seem to have wandered off somewhere and never returned. Possibly they were on one of the numerous fetch quests that the game inflicts on you with increasing frequency as you progress. You have to choose sides in a completely uninteresting conflict that has made maybe one actual appearance in the game so far, and the main plot becomes somehow predictable and disjointed at the same time. We then spiral farther down into the hackish recesses of the video game writer’s standard bag of tricks: predictable treachery, a frankly idiotic father-son subplot, and enough deus ex machina to power Big Ben. It all culminates in, I’m not kidding, a secret supersoldier plot, of which you were a prototype. I actually went, “Oh, for f**k’s sake,” out loud, when this massive twist was revealed.

I don’t mind that the game makes you do some irritating fetch quests, I don’t mind that the combat is pretty easy, and I don’t mind that the character-leveling system isn’t perfect. But to build my expectations with the first bit of the plot and then shit all over me at the end; it’s like going to your favorite deli, having the nice old lady behind the counter smile at you and say, “I bet you want your favorite today, don’t you dearie?” and then when you nod enthusiastically, she hands you a bologna sandwich with Kraft singles on Wonderbread, instead of pastrami on pumpernickel with hot pepper cheese and stone-ground mustard. There’s nothing terribly wrong with bologna with American cheese on Wonderbread; but it’s boring and bog-standard and utterly unremarkable, and if you were all revved up to eat a really good sandwich, it’ll make you want to fucking kill people with a pickle spear!

That being said, I could nitpick this game for another – good lord – 1500-odd words, but even though I sound like I hate every line of code this game contains, it’s actually quite the opposite. I think that it’s sufficiently engrossing that its numerous flaws – some of which are probably inherent to the action RPG genre and therefore not entirely CDProjekt’s fault – are outweighed and can be overlooked. On balance, then, the Witcher is a good game that provides more frustratingly blurry glimpses into how good the action RPG can be, and why we’re so frustrated when it’s not.