The Witcher – Review

Once in a while you encounter a game that totally irks you and you uninstall it faster than you can say, WITCH! Well mga kapatid, this is one of those games! Ito na siguro ang isa sa pinakamaiksing review na maisusulat ko. The Witcher is a game set in the world of good old medieval fantasy much like Dungeons and Dragons Online and the similarities stop there.

The Witcher is running on the Aurora 2007 engine. The updated version of the engine used in Never Winter Nights 1! A game almost half a decade old! Not surprisingly the graphics on this game are not as good as many RPGs on the market today. Heck, even Ragnarok Online’s 2d characters look better in my opinion. The environments look like they were rendered blocks. Environments aren’t destructible, only certain “choosen” ones are. Explosions don’t even make a mark on the walls and floor. The characters move like they lack locomotive skills (and oh my goodness, even on the intro!), mas magaling pa gumalaw si Sadako.

As bad as The Witcher looks, it even sounds worse. The music is uninspired and the swordplay sounds like hitting two spoons together instead of swords! Magic is supposed to sound impressive but a spell I used to knock over a huge pile of rubble sounded like a whimper. Mas malakas pa utot ko grabe! If the sound effects annoyed me, the voice acting absolutely disgusted me. It’s like they hired a couple of grade school kids to act in a play! It would have been forgivable if the script was good but heck it wasn’t!

So what’s good about the game? I’d say it’s the combat. In other games we click and wait for the enemy to die. In some, you click repeatedly ’til they die. Here, you need to click in rhythm. You need to do so to pull of combos and final attacks. This is sort of a deviation from most RPGs. So even if you encounter the same enemies repeatedly, combat doesn’t get boring at all.

Second thing, you get to go horizontal with most of the ladies in game. You know, hop on the good foot and do the “bad” thing? Di mo parin ma gets? Sige, for the sake of our younger readers I’ll put it succinctly, you get to “MAKE LOVE” to almost if not all of the female characters. And you get a picture of them in various states of undress as a reward! I know there would be a couple of guys who would play this game just for this. You know who you are, menyek!

The game mechanics are fairly simple like most RPGs. You level up, you get new skills and abilities. And this is all covered with “features” more annoying than exciting; like making potions and such. The game interface requires you to play for several hours to finally get it going smoothly. Grabe mga kapatid, this game has more bugs than an ant hill. (I’ve never had Sylvester die out on me except on Crysis but this game keeps shutting down my video cards! GARRRR!!!)

The Witcher is the type of game that you’d play once (if you can stomach all its quirks) and quickly put away to find better games. There simply is no replay value to it.

All in all, stay away from The Witcher and hope the next title will be better, The Witchest! yokyokyok

Graphics – 4
Sound – 3
Playability – 6
Longevity – 3