Category: Game Reviews

The Witcher 3 is great, and you should play it immediately.

The Witcher 3 follows closely after the events of The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings. Geralt is a witcher (not a witch, or witch-hunter), a human transformed by mutagens and trained to kill monsters that prey on common people. He has recovered his lost memory and is on the search for his love, the sorceress Yennefer. He finds Yennefer in the service of Emhyr var Emreis, the emperor of Nilfgaard. Emreis has a mission for them: to find his daughter (and Geralt’s adopted daughter) Ciri. Ciri has been missing for a long time, but Emreis’s intelligence has spotted her in the conflicted lands of Velen, Novigrad, and Skellige. Ciri is thought to be pursued by the Wild Hunt, a mythical group of spectral riders that bring death everywhere they go. Geralt goes out in search of Ciri and the hunt begins.

If you’ve never played a Witcher game, the most obvious comparison is to a third-person Skyrim. It’s a huge, third-person action RPG with a single character focus. You’re not an avatar of yourself, but Geralt. Geralt has a voice, and history, but his conduct is largely up to the player. Dialog options aren’t restricted to “saint” or “asshole” but several shades in between. Sometimes you can use witcher magic to manipulate conversations, but (in contrast to previous games) this sometimes backfires. Geralt can freely summon a horse, and fast travel is available at semi-regular intervals throughout the world. The main quest is not time-limited, so you’re free to pursue side quests, witcher contracts (monster hunts), and play mini-games. Areas are not auto-leveled to provide a particular challenge and it’s not difficult to wander into a fight you’re not ready for, which gives exploration an appealing degree of danger. The quests in the game are helpfully labeled with a suggested player level, which I found to be mostly accurate to the degree of challenge I expected.

If you played The Witcher 2 (and you should, it’s amazing), then you’re likely pretty familiar with how to play The Witcher 3. It still has two swords, heavy and light attacks, potions, throwables, and magical signs. It has, however, been thoroughly tweaked to make the gameplay a little smoother. Melee attacks are not as easily interrupted. Potions are brewed once (after recipe and ingredients have been found) and then they stay in limited quantities in your inventory and auto-refill with every rest period. Potions don’t last as long as they used to, so they’re more freely chugged during combat. There are no knives to throw, but they’ve been replaced with a crossbow and bombs auto-refill like the potions do. The axii sign (mind control) actually works outside of dialog in The Witcher 3 to stun enemies, and yrden (magical trap) is less of an instant stun and more of an area-of-effect debuff zone. The availability of traps is far, far lower in The Witcher 3, which is great news if you’re still having nightmares about that trap-filled jungle outside of Flotsam. You can freely dodge, block, and parry without worrying about a stamina meter. Signs require a recharge time per casting, but it can be sped up with character development. Overall, some of the rough corners of The Witcher 2‘s main combat loop have been smoothed over in positive ways.

Beyond the mechanics of the gameplay, this is very much an evolution of The Witcher games of the past. No easy choices, and very few of them shake out entirely from the start. You find out hours later how your choices have affected the world. It doesn’t only affect characters either, as the actual world of The Witcher 3 changes. Not in huge ways, but little details such as seeing more soldiers in the streets, or different background conversations as the game progresses.

Quest design is incredible. The main story has a few interesting turns, but some of the side quests almost overshadow it. It felt like the designers got to where most video games would end a quest line, and decided to continue it for a few more beats. Of all the many, many quests I completed, I only ran into one that got stuck on a bug, and even that quest could be completed in another way due to its design. Even beyond quests, the landscape is littered with stuff to do, like destroy monster nests, find hidden treasures, and liberate areas from bandits. There’s a CCG-ish mini game called Gwent that some people are huge fans of. I’m not one of them, but I appreciate it for doing something other than simple dice poker. Secondary quests include Gwent, fist fighting tournaments (like those in The Witcher 2), and horse racing. The amount of stuff to do in the game easily rivals or surpasses the largest RPGs.

There is also a huge amount of little details that The Witcher 3 gets right, where most games do not. There is no unspoken dialog. Every conversation is voiced. Even though the world is absolutely enormous, the parts of it all seem unique and different. Where most games this big might feel like they’ve been cut and paste together, the world of The Witcher 3 feels crafted. Every piece of equipment changes Geralt’s look with very few palette swaps. Cutscenes are all rendered in-game, so every Geralt looks like your Geralt. If you’re riding your horse, you can hold down the run button and the horse will (mostly intelligently) follow the trail you’re on. It’s all of these little touches that add up to The Witcher 3 being an amazingly immersive experience. There’s very little in the game that pulls you out of its world.

If I had to make one complaint about the game, it’s that the crafted narrative experience comes at the expense of having a character that represents the player. Playing the whole game as Geralt simply isn’t going to appeal to every single person, and it doesn’t have to, but it limits the audience. Your Geralt probably differs from mine in many ways, but we’re both still playing as Geralt, not some representation of ourselves. It’s a downside to the improved narrative you get from playing a single character. When you’re playing a character, you can’t play as yourself. Compared its modern RPG contemporaries, such as Pillars of Eternity, Dragon Age, or Skyrim, this makes The Witcher 3 rather limited in choice of player representation.

But if you’re into Geralt, this is the best Witcher game yet. It’s an enormous open world that is fun to explore and live in for the many, many hours you’ll spend in it. It’s an extremely immersive game that sends The Witcher series out on a very high note.

I think I’ve played about as much of this as I need to. Saints Row 3 is the last complete original Saints Row. Saints Row 4, though almost as large as SR3, was more or less a rehash of SR3 but with a Matrix twist. Gat Out of Hell is SR4 except on an new arrangement of a smaller landmass. It’s not Steelport, it’s an original map, but everything looks and feels like the previous two games. It feels like we’ve been deriving less interesting games from SR3 ever since THQ folded.

Gat Out of Hell is, at best, a standalone expansion pack. It directly continues from the end of SR4. You can only play as Johnny Gat or Kinzie Kensington. You can’t change their appearance. There’s no licensed music. There’s not much music at all. There are no story missions per se. Once you start the game, you’re given free reign to do any of the multitude of side missions available. They’re all plays on the same missions from previous Saints Rows. Once you complete enough of them, you get the one boss fight in the game, and then the story is more or less done. It takes less than 3 hours to get through.

Afterwards, I spent a couple more hours completing the rest of the side missions, which rewarded me with animated epilogues for the companion characters. They’re no more than 30 seconds of video each. If I were to keep playing, I could pursue the rest of grindy missions like getting 100 kills with a particular weapon or power, or chase collectibles, but the game is over. My clock reads over 7 hours but no more.

The most interesting part of the game is that it offers something like 5 or 6 different endings, a couple of which could clearly lead to a more interesting Saints Row sequel. Hopefully it’s a ways off, because this series desperately needs a shakeup. It feels like they’ve thoroughly exhausted what they started in Saints Row 3.

All of the descriptions of this being a Japanese Gears of War are completely accurate. It’s a third-person cover-based shooter, with a quirk in that you can influence how much your team likes you by speaking to them using your headset. You get prompted with yes/no questions pretty often, and they like/dislike you depending on your performance in combat. Shoot a bunch of robots, they think you’re great! Shoot them, and they complain. Something I didn’t necessarily realize is that the social system affects your ending!

The game looks great. It’s super-smooth, with only a bit of slowdown when I’d have like 10 robots exploding at the same time, and that was really rare. There are a ton of boss fights, but none of them are frustrating as they all subscribe to the “shoot the blinking parts” philosophy. The controls work great with mouse and keyboard. The voice acting isn’t perfect, but your team is composed of soldiers from different nations. Some of the accents are bad, and some are passable, but what thrilled me is that the Japanese police, who would have no business casually speaking English to each other, actually speak Japanese with subtitles! That tiny attention to detail means a lot to me. When Return to Castle Wolfenstein came out and all the Germans spoke English with German accents, I was totally disappointed.

The story is well written. It’s a nice sci-fi, what makes a man yarn. It has a pretty lighthearted tack to it, without being completely cartoonish. It’s more like a good action movie that occasionally asks serious questions. It sets up a sequel, which I’m looking forward to, but I don’t think we’ll see. I don’t think Binary Domain sold all that well, and it’s a serious departure for its creator who previously made all the Yakuza games. I never played any of them, but they have a rather dedicated following.

Next time Binary Domain goes on sale somewhere (I got it from Amazon, Steam-redeemable), you should get it. Don’t be completely turned off by the B grade cover art. It definitely exceeded my expectations.