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In my very own utterly indifferent kind of way, I wanted to like Witcher 3. Truly, I did. I had little to no expectations going into it but was hoping it would enter my PS4 and do what has proved almost impossible for PS4 games: satisfy me. But by the time I came across a troll that wanted to sing the "trollololo" song to Geralt, I felt like that was the game's way of poking fun at me for my attempts at searching for a game hidden beneath cut-scenes and busywork questing. I frowned, and the frown never left my face as I edged towards an end that stubbornly remained out of reach, in increasingly anti-climatic fashion.

Whilst Witcher 2 was not the greatest game known to mankind by any stretch of the imagination, it did have a sense of purpose--momentum. And a narrative driven dark fantasy paired with something akin to self-insert male fantasy is difficult for most males to say no to; myself included. It most certainly had clunky, awkward combat but just the mere notion of a medieval WRPG complete with a predefined, non-silent lead + boobs made it hard for me to hate. Naturally, I still moaned about it but I did enjoy it, overall. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of its bloated sequel, which opted for equal parts tedious and dull episodic mini-arcs over the far more compelling 'Assassin of Kings' narrative seen in Witcher 2. Getting into Witcher 3 at all was a challenge, where as - in stark contrast - its prequel grabbed my attention from the get-go with its fast-paced intro.

When the game arrived with a slipcover, game manual, compendium, soundtrack, map, stickers AND a thank you note for purchasing (although I was grateful for the unusually generous gifts in an age where proper game manuals no longer come with games), being the cynical git that I am, my first thought was that I was being compensated in advance for a failing of some variety. And, even more unfortunately, my gut instinct proved unerringly accurate. Effort and good PR alone does not make game developers exempt from criticism.

One of my main complaints about Witcher 3 is that it was released CLEARLY unfinished and unable to perform up to the required standard on consoles. The load times once you reach the second area, Velen, are so bad that I did not want to die purely because dying meant waiting upwards of one minute for the game to reload; a sort of additional punishment for failure. So many patches (up to 1.04 ALREADY) in quick succession, yet that sodding horse Roach was still busy floating in the sky in Kaer Morhen even after the latest patch. All I had to do was ride down a hill / mountain and Roach would be running on air whilst attempting some form of horse handstand. Bugs like that are EVERYWHERE, with the most comical example being when a bear killed a quest-giving NPC whilst trying to kill me, right as I was returning having finished the quest... before randomly reviving in front of me later. And then there is the frame-rate drops. When it was raining and I was in Novigrad in particular, it almost reminded me of the start of Castlevania: Lord of Shadows. The game just could not handle it. I have to assume the developers prevented people from galloping on horseback through Novigrad and Oxenfurt purely because it would break the game if things had to load that fast. Countless times I walked up to quest NPCs, got no prompt to talk to them, and had to JUMP (in-game, mainly) in order for the interaction prompt to appear, or just wait for the game to catch up with me. And the game seemed to just give up altogether towards the end when the frame-rate dropped well under 20FPS during the blizzard end battle. Unacceptable for a full price game. I often felt like I was a beta tester rather than a paying customer. Having the text size eventually increased from eye-strain to readable was small consolation.

Ciri's gameplay portions in particular - one of the major changes from Witcher 2 - are laughably inept to the point one has to wonder HOW they passed any form of quality assessment. They scream unfinished. Ciri is so game-breaking overpowered in her teleport-spam EASY gameplay sections it begs the question of why Geralt even needs to save her in the first place, but the far more baffling issue is that you can simply ignore the enemies, teleport past them, reach the waypoint... and that is it: GAMEPLAY, OVER. I did this in Ciri's Novigrad segment and was greeted with the image of enemies doing a bizarre military march up some stairs, not attacking me, in one huge line. Farcical.



Another issue is outright disappointment with the best example yet I have encountered of 'bigger does not mean better'. Outside of the two larger towns, the areas in each region and the 'Mudsvile' mini-towns in each region look FAR too samey. I would find fast travel markers, get quests off notice boards and feel generally underwhelmed. And exploring the countless question marks is entirely pointless (and often frustrating since the fall damage is RIDICULOUS: Geralt nearly dying after even small drops) outside of finding 'places of power' for additional ability points - only attainable otherwise by leveling up - and Witcher gear treasure hunts, which break the game by making crafting or looting other equipment WORTHLESS. Pitiful amounts of experience points are offered for side-quests and killing monsters whilst, in contrast, insane amounts ranging from 200-800xp are instead given for challenging main story tasks such as... talking to NPCs. When you get so much experience for doing so little just completing tedious main quest tasks, why bother? Only hunting down unique and occasionally challenging monsters via monster contracts was enjoyable since the game basically auto-levels as you progress. Also irksome is the game having a 'five level rule' where - on the hardest difficulty especially - if you are more than five levels below enemies you die in two hits. The reverse is also true: if you are five levels above quests, you only get FIVE experience points, when you need 1000-2000 to level up. In addition, there is little to nothing to spend money on and 99.1% of loot is just junk that has to be sold / dismantled or else Geralt decides to be as annoying as his horse and refuse to run. Many times I had to sift through my inventory just trying to work out what junk was weighing me down even after selling equipment. Far from ideal when the inventory is best described as a cluster of 'WHY THIS LAYOUT NOOOOO'!

But, in truth, what does pure padding side content matter if the main story is good? Well, here is the thing: as excellent as the dialogue and characterisation can be, the pacing is atrocious throughout, with busywork chores making up the vast majority of the game. At times it became so mind-numbing I would need to check what, exactly, my latest busywork objective was in the ever helpful quest log. For nearly the entire duration, the story is as follows: Find Ciri. You must go to three different regions and, predictably, fail to find Ciri in each of them. During this there were moments, such as during the Baron's family drama story, where I cared enough to want to see how the episodic mini-stories would turn out. But there was zero main narrative progression and I was only impressed by the game NOT being a game, I quickly came to realise. And by the time Ciri was actually found, I did not understand or care about whatever the convoluted 'read the novels' main narrative was supposed to be... which, as as far as I could tell, involved a war against evil teleporting elves with ice powers and skull masks / voice modulation.

I began officially wanting to beat my head into the nearest wall when I reached Novigrad. At first I was intrigued: AN ACTUAL TOWN! I thought the real game would start, right there. Instead - and I kid you not - I spent around 5-10 hours doing exciting tasks such as exterminating rats, investigating a haunted house and walking back and forth talking to NPCs trying to figure out how Geralt's idiot bard friend, Dandy, had got himself in trouble. The game would keep shoveling experience points down my throat for very little and it kept going... and going...... AND GOING. Eventually I found myself acting in a play to find a doppelganger in order to find Dandy whilst involving myself with a dwarf gangster. By then I had lost all hope for Witcher 3 as a game. I assumed Novigrad would be the low-point, and a fairly epic last stand - which I assumed / hoped to be the end of the game - made me think it would be... but NO: typical of the game up to that point, IT KEPT GOING. Worse, the busywork workload INCREASED: I had to talk to a NPC waiting to watch a whale to find a cave, as well as swimming to a boat, using my powers of stealth.... just for a cut-scene. STEALTH SWIMMING. I was begging for it to end and it kept refusing, with an anti-climax around every turn.



And now, finally - almost fittingly as an afterthought - we come to the gameplay: the small bits hidden between interacting with NPCs and Geralt ("Run, Roach!") / myself insulting the damned horse for getting stuck and refusing to jump. Many people mention the clunky combat, and for good reason. HOWEVER, a more irksome issue is that game is unbalanced. There are four difficulties, and by the end the game is SO EASY even on the hardest difficulty that you are forced to receive less experience points to compensate for the lack of difficulty. Yet, at the start, the game can be unforgiving. Before potions, bombs and Witcher gear - especially if you try to explore - even gangs of wolves proved challenging... until I realised holding block defies logic by working against them no matter the angle, yet not against other creatures. I got annoyed to the point I lowered the difficulty to normal, before quickly returning to hard and then finally going up to 'very hard'. The game can be so easily broken by finding Witcher gear, upgrading melee skills and applying red mutagens that even early on it reaches the point where I considered intentionally lowering my stats. Bizarrely, the hardest parts of the game on the higher difficulties were - wait for it - FIST FIGHTS when outnumbered since it took only a few punches for a mutant monster hunter to go down, when blades / claws did little to him.

As for the combat itself, it is much the same as in Witcher 2: two swords (which, once again, initially confused me; resulting in comical in-out accidental sword drawing in towns and guards killing me), dodging and spamming quen (a defense spell) in order to tank hits. As with Witcher 2, the four spells other than quen proved mostly useless, some occasional burning and mind control aside. The only real improvement to the combat was that, in addition to dodge rolling, you can now do a shorter dodge instead of rolling miles away from enemies. Honestly, all you would really need to do to beat the game on normal is press R2 to cast quen, square to attack and circle to dodge. Just do not expect responsive precision. The rest of the gameplay consists of Geralt using 'Batman vision' to do investigating busywork and being made to hate riding virtual horses--as compelling as it reads, I assure you.

My Witcher 3 experience can be summerised by how I ended the game. Due playing it on the hardest difficulty for the most part, I got less experience points than those that played the game on normal; ending the game at level 33 due to wanting challenge when level 35 is needed for a gold trophy. You only get 5xp for side-quests when over-leveled, and I had done most of them - pointlessly - anyway. So, as a dutiful trophy-whore determined to get my ONE gold trophy from the game after 50+(?) hours, off to the internet I went. Someone, somewhere discovered a trick involving a level 30 enemy where you can kill it, meditate, and it instantly re-spawns. After killing about 40 on the easiest difficulty, with huge bodies lying everywhere which occasionally spaz-glitched into the sky, I got my trophy. But before that, I got knocked off the side of a cliff and was left stuck: unable to get back up and only suicide awaiting me if I moved. The game reduced me to the point of choosing suicide in-game, and the same would be true for me in real life, I fear, if I had to play any more. So, I shall accept only getting the bronze easy / normal difficulty trophy after playing it on hard-very hard for most of the game as a final insult and off to Amazon UK via trade-in it will go. Farewell, for I loved you not... Triss aside.



PS: Upon seeing my rather critical review score, some of you (males) might be thinking, "...b-but it has story choices, boobs and sex and boobs!" - a valid argument, for sure. However, what I did not know going into Witcher 3 was that due to an apparent feminist backlash the game developers, CD Projekt RED, received after Witcher 2 dared to have a somewhat artistically erotic Trissex scene (complete with a pubic hair glimpse), they decided to go more... politically correct and tone down the sex / usage of sex to the point of lazy EXACT SAME SCENES, very short sequences; tragically with no female pubic hairs in sight. They either lied about the tens of hours of smut or removed it all. There is a ten page forum thread on this very subject on CD Projekt RED's forum if you doubt me, with many a male left in anguish.

The series is, essentially, male wish fulfillment... and Witcher 3 only offers Triss / Yennifer romance without the whole fulfillment bit. Even more so for me since the 'threesome' I worked towards was not quite what I - or Geralt - had in mind. In Witcher 2 it was actually harder not to find a brothel than to find one, but in Witcher 3 it took MANY hours to find any similar respectable romancing establishments. And the NPC models are similar to the point of having near identical petite builds and, often, faces--a lack of NPC variation being a noticeable problem in general. For example, I did a side-quest involving being a fencing instructor for a tomboy. She had a playful twin. This excited me. The result? NOTHING... although I did find the exact same character model, hair and all, elsewhere. I then did another quest involving a succubus, even more expectant. The result? She was not into the whole sex-reward thing. I cried... oh, and as for story choices, unlike in the prequel, there is no midway point split path to add re-playability. Disappointing whichever way you look at it... unless you are a single play-through feminist, that is. There are multiple endings, but in terms of romance, a brief mention in a still-image montage is your lot.