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The Witcher

You can look but you can't quite touch

The Witcher wears its BioWare engine proudly on its sleeves, in that play areas are markedly restricted. Think KOTOR but on a grander, richer scale. Free-roaming Oblivion/Gothic fans may be disappointed by this but BioWare have always preferred using clearly defined cells for each area, rather than masquerading their use by streaming data off the hard drive. Locations are heavily detailed in The Witcher, so constant disk activity would most likely knacker the performance anyway.

Sunset over the city. Sensible folk leg it for their homes but not our hero!

Play areas are restricted, as in KOTOR, but they're also pretty big - you'll be spending some time just travelling back and forth.

Unfortunately, the frequent loading screens do take the edge off the game; even on a test system with 4GB of system memory, a 3GHz quad core CPU and a 500GB 7200rpm 16MB hard drive, the loading of the larger maps was rather tiresome. In some cases, the issue is compounded by the further use of scripted scenes and/or too many "are you sure?" questions. For example, at one point in the game, there comes a time where you have to frequently hop between part of a city and a swamp area: this involves 3 major loads, 2 cutscenes and 3 confirmations to a ferryman who won't take yes the first time. And this happens every time you want to cross between these locations...

Far isometric view.

Near isometric view.

The world can be viewed in one of three ways: two isometric angles or a far more preferable, over-the-shoulder third person view. The latter does take some getting used to (like other aspects of the game) as Garalt runs along to left or right of the cursor, and by some considerable margin. Why CDProjekt chose this method of doing things isn't clear until one looks BioWare's next PC RPG, Dragon Age... hmmm. Anyway, the isometric view. The developers claim this is the best choice for basic gamers but I utterly disagree. The problem is one of control: there are no keys to rotate the camera, only Garalt himself, so one must push the cursor to the screen sides to slowly shift the view; however, once you move off, the camera automatically swings around behind your character again. The game's far more entertaining in third person anyway, so just don't bother.

Mini-games: cute little puzzles, right?

Fixed cells can often give the impression in a game of a lack of things to do or a world with life, beyond the standard quests, but The Witcher enlivens the adventure by offering several mini-games to try in the main locations: drinking competitions, fist-fights in pubs, dice gambling almost anywhere and sleeping with women. Yes, that's right, no deep love affairs for monster hunters who fire blanks: just rampant nookie at every possibility. Honest, the game actually "rewards" successful... ummm... ahhh... "conquests" with a heavily blurred movie, furnished with what can only be described as a Top Trump set of semi-naked women. And don't just think skimpy tops: this is an 18 rated game for a very good reason. One does have to assume that Witchers are particularly resilient to all forms of STDs, given some of the ladies one can entertain, but could you imagine Nintendo doing such a thing in a Zelda RPG?

Hello duckie!

Fancy a tickle of the dice? Warning: gambling is seriously addictive.

My wife will no doubt knee-cap me for this but the boozin', gamblin', fightin' and lovin' add real fun to the game, and I found myself wasting an awful lot of time trying my hand at winning over nuns and betting my last ounces of gold in pubs. All in the name of journalism, you understand.

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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