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The Witcher

My Kung Fu is strong

As with any RPG, sooner or later one must take a large, pointy, metal thing and imbue various entities with its life-extracting properties. Actually, here, one does it straight away, but those damn cutscenes do a fine job of making you think that, for a trained killer, fighting is the last thing you want to do. Combat in general is a bit of an acquired taste to begin with but once you've gone up a few levels and gained more skills, the simplicity of it is replaced by pulse-raising Kung Fu and Matrix moves. Basically, one sticks the cursor over an enemy and left-clicks: that's it. Repeat, until dead. However, you can change attacks into uber-sequences by clicking again at indicated moments. This must make it sound fairly crap and... well... it is, a bit, but you regularly face multiple enemies, of varying types, and this is where it starts to get a wee bit complicated.

Hack, slash, chop, main! Combat is a rather simple but bloody affair.

As well as potions, one can boost weapons with various tools and runes. Here, a quick whetstone does the trick.

Witchers can carry up to 4 different weapons: two swords that allow you to do the Kung Fu moves (one suited for killing humans, the other being better for monsters), a large axe or club, and a small knife or axe. The Witcher swords also have three different attack modes: slow but hard, fast but weak, attack multiple enemies but really weak. Sounds rather chaotic and, at times, it is! After a few hours of hacking away, you soon get the hang of it; in fact, one's adaptation to the combat system is timed just right because eventually battles become seriously tough. One often just doesn't face lots of monsters but creatures that must be tackled with a different attacking style to be quickly defeated.

It's the drugs, man! The drugs!

Of course, this being an RPG, one has the use of spells (although not immediately) and potions. The former is restricted to a small range of basic castings, but they can be improved as one gains skills. Drinkies, though, are far more important and you soon realise that a fair bit of your time needs to be devoted to understanding how they work. A neat twist on the whole potion thing is that most of them are poisonous, limiting the amount one can knock back. By all means, load up on chemicals to boost your stats but don't overdo it, otherwise things turn nasty. See kids, drugs are baaaaad...

More standard RPG fare comes in the form of experience points, levels and the skill tree. Performing tasks, killing monsters and so on rewards you in experience which eventually accumulates into "talents". Essentially, they're medals which can be swapped for stats, skills and spell enhancements during periods of rest (which is restricted to specific locations). Calling it a skill tree is perhaps a little unfair because one does not have to follow the skill bonuses in a linear fashion: provided one has the requisite talent points, one can easily indulge in a spot of pick 'n' mix.

Gamers playing The Witcher on easy difficulty levels can just stick to combat bonuses but at harder levels, one really needs to look at getting the most from bottles of power-raising Charlie and spells. The former can be bought or created, provided you have the knowledge (gained from NPCs or books) and the ingredients (bought from shops or gathered from the land). Spells, though, come naturally to you but since you've "forgotten" how to do them, they only come back to you once you've touched some stones, for some reason. They start off pretty weak but towards the end, properly boosted through talent points, they make you see why Witchers are hard as nails.

Page 1: Introduction & BackgroundPage 2: Characters and QuestsPage 3: Combat and SkillsPage 4: Getting Around & Mini-gamesPage 5: Graphics and Hardware RequirementsPage 6: Final Thoughts & Scores

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