3rd person, Adventure, Open World, RPG
Platform: PC
Before I start the review, I have to say that going into this title I was prepared to like it. I played and enjoyed the first two Witcher games over the past few years and was very excited about this game. I preordered this game.
Visuals: I really enjoyed the art style of this game! It was a great mix of realistic and fantasy that I really enjoyed. I think this is the prettiest game that I have played in terms of looking realistic. The monster design was done very well and the creatures conveyed the emotion that they should have (i.e. vampires were creepy, sirens were attractive until you were too close). The monster design coupled with the world design made for a very complete world that was engaging and believable. I'm not normally a stickler for graphics, but everything in this game fits with the theme and you can tell that the design was given ample love to make the adventure coherent. A gripe I did have was that with some of the free DLC released with the game included alternate costumes for some of the female leads and sometimes the cut scenes would swap back to the original clothes only to switch to the DLC mid scene.
Audio: The music that there was in the game was pretty good! It lacked a bit of variety though. When you go into a tavern or see a minstrel on the street of a town there are only a couple songs that can play. In battle, there was only a couple different tracks for the whole 100+ hours of game. I think they might have needed to double the number of tracks in the game to keep the songs somewhat fresh. Maybe tripled. I can't complain too much about the voices, as I think the actors did a fair job for the most part. They certainly could have used a few more actors as well though. There are probably over a thousand npcs and some of the voice actors are so distinct that you can tell when peasant A is voiced the same as peasant B. They did a great job of giving all of the big story characters their own voice though and they are all voiced quite well.
Gameplay: The controls felt pretty good for the most part, especially when they added an alternate control mode to allow control of Geralt to turn in a tighter radius. The way that the buttons mapped to the 360 controller that I used took a little time to get used to, but after the initial adjustment, they felt very natural the rest of the game. I played the previous entries with mouse/keyboard so that may have been why it took me a while. As much as I loved this game, I think they made it too big (110 hours in Steam to complete everything minus the card game Gwent). There was a ton to do, but it almost felt like too much. I tend to like shorter games, so this may only be a personal preference.There was a good variety of stuff to balance with exploring the world. The combat felt a little finicky at times, but it was very open and there were many ways to approach the same fight.
Story: This is where the Witcher series has always shined for me. The story in this game was quite good. The main quest affected me emotionally as did a few of the side quests which is not something I can say about many games. The Witcher games are based loosely on a book popular series in Poland by Andrzej Sapkowski. That being said, the player has almost complete control over Geralt's choices throughout the story. It's a very interesting way to tell the story, because Geralt has a personality of his own but it seems as though he is adding spice to every interaction. Instead of having the main character be a blank slate to be projected onto, Geralt is Geralt and the player gets to decide which of his personality traits get to take center stage. I liked this a lot, but I could see how others may dislike it quite a bit.
Overall: 9/10
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