Recently, CD Projekt Red has been keen on revisiting their finished titles. After its launch, Cyberpunk 2077 has been recieveing iterative work and starting meet the expectations set prior to launch.

Similarly, the publisher has released a free update for the title that put them on the global map – The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

With this update I went back to the Xbox One X (XBO-X) version and compared it to the Xbox Series X (XSX) upgrades. I did not have an Xbox Series S, so I was not able to see some of the updates there. Please be aware this is not a review of The Witcher 3 – I’m only discussing the upgrades. For a full look at the game as whole, you can find our initial coverage here, a second opinion here, and reviews of the DLC content, Hearts of Stone as well as Blood and Wine.

Now, the next-gen upgrade.

Basic improvements are immediately apparent when booting up the title, as the load times are massively improved from getting to the main menu and into game, though one still has to wade through the obligatory legal screens. In the last generation of consoles, there was narration over the loading screens that informed the user of their progress. These moments of narration barely have time to finish on Xbox Series X before entering play, which is a relief as those loads could be beefy.  

The Quick Resume feature is a blessing too. Going back to the XBO-X and loading up my save to play for 15-20 minutes felt like I was wasting my time, as this is a game that takes a while to get going and dipping in and out for a single mission is not how it begs to be experienced. On the XSX version there was a brief load and a save data sync, and then I was right back where I left off. It’s a strange thing to be praising, but that speed allowed me to collect a few herbs, kill a couple of monsters and track down an errant side quest without feeling like there was a huge obligation to dump hours in because getting through the loading time was such a commitment. The knowledge that I could more quickly get in and out had me going back more regularly.

Now for the more obvious upgrades – the visual fidelity.

Personally, I thought that a lot of the non-metal texture upgrades were nice, but not groundbreaking. Things like horsehair and burnished leather are improved from the slightly flatter-looking XBO-X textures, but aren’t enough to merit a replay. The armor fares worse, as the shiny effect feels like a little too much given how grimy the rest of The Witcher 3 is, and it’s distracting. That said, some of the work done on the level of detail at long distances and the lighting are great. On XBO-X, The Witcher 3 looked impressive as I would crest a hill and look down into a valley littered with houses and trees, but on the XSX the draw distance takes it to the next level thanks to more incidental detail in everything and beautiful lighting – the sunset and sunrise are breathtaking, and the effect in small chalets adds a warmth to the surroundings as if bathed in a deep amber hue. In the bigger city, the effect is even more noticeable with rays coming down through buildings and enriching the pageantry and pomp.  

The character models have all received a bit of an upgrade, though some more than others. Geralt is now more heavily detailed and the supporting cast are all improved, but it doesn’t hide some of the more robotic NPCs who have dialogue. NPC modeling has apparently not gotten much attention, though I’m not sure it would make sense considering how many NPCs there are in a game this big.

Other than that, there’s not much more to say – the mechanics and storytelling seem untouched. If someone bounced off The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt previously, this update won’t pull them in and for fans who’ve exhausted the content available and want a fresh reason to dive back in, this won’t be enough. However, for those already wanting to return to the world of The Witcher or for those who haven’t yet been, this is the perfect time.

The post The Witcher 3: Next-Gen Update appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Meve is one of the best protagonists in ages.

LOW Exploring the overworld is pretty dull.

WTF Trying to place these events in the timeline when I haven’t read the books.

There are many things to love about The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and something that often gets lost in the shuffle (ha!) is that it featured one of the best games-within-a-game since Triple Triad made Final Fantasy VIII worth playing. Gwent was so fully-fledged and enjoyable that CD Projekt RED saw fit to give the collectible card game its own standalone release as a free-to-play online experience.

After two years in beta, Gwent: The Witcher Card Game was quietly released in its finalized form last month, along with a hearty single-player campaign called Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales. Although it obviously doesn’t feature the production values of the mainline Witcher titles, the writing and voice acting are totally consistent with the series’ standards, and the campaign makes a pretty strong case for Gwent being a damn good game in its own right.

For those who haven’t tried it, Gwent is a hybrid of collectible card mechanics and tower defense. A player places one card on the table per turn, each with a numerical power rating. By the end of the round, the player with the highest power point total wins. It’s incredibly simple in concept, but made interesting by the countless active, passive and circumstantial abilities of individual units, which can be used to buff friendly cards or attack enemies.

Cards are divided into different factions, each with their own play style. The Scoia’tael, for example, tend to favor setting traps and dealing surprise damage over time, while Monsters attempt to overwhelm enemies with large swarms of weaker units. In the multiplayer mode these are all accessible from the start, but in Thronebreaker, we’re locked into the perspective of Meve, the queen of Lyria, as she’s forced to fend off a Nilfgaardian invasion.

CD Projekt RED has come a long way in its depiction of female characters since the original Witcher had players scoring trading cards for every woman that they slept with, and Meve is a benchmark of that progress. Middle-aged, battle-scarred, sensibly dressed and in no less than full control of herself, Meve is one of the strongest female protagonists produced by this team or any other. A twist at the end of the first chapter drops her into a desperate situation, and it’s a credit to the writing that we never question her resolve, even as we see through her actions just how taxing it is.

Even as someone who hasn’t read the books, there’s no mistaking how detailed and morally complex Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy world is, but until now we’ve viewed its political workings through the eyes of the famously neutral Geralt of Rivia. With Meve, it’s great to finally have a more direct stake in events, and to be given a sense of responsibility over the land — even to feel heartbroken and conflicted when it falls to ruin.

Thronebreaker asks players a string of brutally realistic questions, in which the ‘right’ choice doesn’t always lead to the most desirable results, and sympathetic actions aren’t always met with praise and thanks. When I rid a Nilfgaard-occupied city of its captors, I thought I was doing its citizens a favor. But since I couldn’t spare men to protect the city afterwards, its inhabitants worried that Nilfgaard would only return to punish them. When I saved a seemingly-innocent elf from being lynched, he repaid the favor by secretly poisoning my men.

Even if I’m happy with my choices, I also have to consider troop morale, which can affect how well they perform in battle. It all reminds me of The Banner Saga, in that it forces us to face the ugliness of decision-making in times of war and desperation. Tolkien tried to teach us that the world would automatically prosper under a good-hearted leader, but this more recent brand of fantasy reminds us that things are more complicated than that.

I’ve been playing Gwent since it entered closed beta almost two years ago, and my fear about Thronebreaker was that it would simply be a set of standard matches against less-savvy AI opponents. That’s thankfully not the case, as CD Projekt RED constantly mixes up the objectives and keeps each encounter fresh and unique. Maybe I need to keep a certain unit alive, or deal with a particular threat within a turn limit. Things get especially creative when unorthodox hazards like rockslides somehow manifest in Gwent form.

Thronebreaker’s most creative moments are its “puzzle” matches, in which players are typically issued a predetermined hand and must set up a Rube Goldberg-like series of events to bring about a very specific outcome. One recurring riddle forced me to destroy all enemy units with what seemed to be a skimpy hand, but then I read the fine print — one of my cards could instantly kill the unit with the highest power level, and I figured out that if I could raise multiple units to that power level, I could take them out simultaneously. Brain-teasers like that aren’t just rewarding, they make players better at the game and teach skills they can bring into multiplayer.

My one major criticism of Thronebreaker is that actually navigating the world is pretty boring. The quest areas are monotonous in color scheme and lack distinctive visual landmarks, meaning I had to constantly consult my map to see where I was and where I needed to go. Plus, the usual rewards for exploration are just the same three resources — gold, wood, and recruits — over and over. As engaged as I was in the battles and story segments, actually getting to those bits was occasionally a drag.

The standalone Gwent release is free on GOG, and I encourage those who enjoy it to shell out the money for Thronebreaker, a strong expansion of both the base game and the Witcher universe. Geralt’s portion of this story may have concluded, but the folks at CD Projekt RED seem committed to sharing more tales from this world, and I couldn’t be more excited. Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by CD Projekt RED. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 34 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. The multiplayer mode is a standalone game that wasn’t factored into this review.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated Teen and contains Violence, Blood, Language and Crude Humor. While the game deals with a lot of grim subject matter — the high death toll and moral haziness of war — there’s very little on-screen violence, since the combat is card-based and the cutscenes are generally just static images and text boxes. The worst is when we see the aftermath of a raid or battle, but even then, it’s nothing graphic. It’s far more appropriate for younger players than the mainline Witcher games.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All important dialogue is text-based, and sound cues are never vital. The character barks a sound whenever a card is played and isn’t subtitled, but they’re unimportant to successful play.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. The game is played entirely by pointing and clicking with the mouse.

The post Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The last ten minutes.

LOW The cliché illusion world was unwanted padding.

WTF Tiny villager, I am genuinely sorry.

Blood And Wine is the second (and final) add-on adventure for The Witcher 3. Astute readers might recall that it launched earlier this year in May, so why is this review coming so late?

I started the content as soon as it dropped, but it released in a buggy state. I got hit by a severe progress-halting glitch, and only after sending my data to CD Projekt Red for analysis (which led to update 1.23–AKA the Gallaway patch) was I able to get back in the game and see it through to the end. So, after such a long, drawn-out and painful road towards putting a bow on the adventures of Geralt of Rivia, was it worth the wait?

I hate to say it, but no… not really.

What I loved most about The Witcher 3 were its rich characters and story. The campaign, the sidequests, and all of the supporting content was amazing. Continuing the trend, its first DLC Hearts Of Stone was absolutely superb–easily one of the best add-ons I’ve ever played. Compared to those two bravura performances, it would’ve been nearly impossible for the developers to top them both with Blood And Wine, and of course they can’t. That bar was just set too high. That’s not to say Blood is bad content–not at all–but it doesn’t reach the lofty heights of its predecessors and suffers in comparison.

The premise of Blood And Wine is that Geralt travels to a brand-new land, summoned to help a duchess rid her domain of a beast that’s slaying the knights of her court. Of course nothing is as it first appears, and there’s a lot more to the beast than appearances suggest.

While I’m always up for a good monster hunt or a mystery to solve, the main plot never took off for me. Part of the problem is that Geralt’s in a new countryside, so almost none of the previously-established characters that I spent more than a hundred hours with make an appearance. This wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself, but it becomes one since none of the new faces clicked with me apart from Regis. This man was clearly someone of note in the books or games prior to Witcher 3 and Geralt has history with him. Their camaraderie was appealing and Regis’s voice actor was great, but apart from that one exception, I didn’t feel any attachment or interest in the rest of the cast–a disappointing surprise given the writers’ generally-great character work.

Making things worse is that what Geralt actually does in the main quest isn’t interesting or exciting. In both Wild Hunt and Hearts Of Stone, there were many absolutely fascinating situations and tough problems to solve. In contrast, Blood And Wine feels as though the developers have run out of ideas. The first half is a bit of fetch-this busywork, and the second half is thick with cliché. Again, it’s not terrible content, but it’s a clear notch below earlier efforts.

Of course, there’s a lot of content in Blood And Wine apart from the main quest–Geralt is awarded an estate that can be upgraded, there are a wealth of sidequests, there’s a pile of gear to search out and tons of treasure to find. The developers even go so far as to add a brand-new skill tree to complement the original one. All the experience points that are likely going unused from past adventures finally have a purpose! Although I didn’t get much use out of the new abilities myself, I appreciated that they were added.

For players who just want more Witcher, there’s no doubt that Blood And Wine delivers. It has a whole new land to explore, there are tons of things to do, and there’s enough content to keep someone busy for dozens of hours. On the other hand, it felt to me like the entire Witcher experience had already peaked, so following it up with something that’s just not as good leaves things in an awkward place. The last ten minutes are absolutely worth seeing, but the hours that come before it? Maybe not so much. Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by CD Projekt Red and published by Warner Bros. It is currently available on PS4, XBO and PC. This copy of the DLC was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS4. Approximately 18 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the main storyline was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains blood and gore, intense violence, nudity, strong language, strong sexual content and use of alcohol. They’re not wrong.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing: There are plenty of subtitles to help out, which is good as there’s a ton of dialogue. Standard situational awareness issues apply, but it does a great job of catering to players less able to hear battle cries and the like for the most part.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options except that the “Witcher vision” clue-finding mode can be flipped to blue instead of the usual red.

The post The Witcher 3: Blood And Wine Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The professor's fate.

LOW A few of the dialogue choices with Shani felt a hair off.

WTF Some folks actually chose a different ending than me? Why?

Look, let's be real here: if there's a game that absolutely does not need DLC, it's The Witcher 3.

Don't get me wrong–I loved it, and although it beat me into submission with how much content it has, at no point did I want to miss a single minute of it. I skipped nothing… but really it's enormous. Huge. I might even say it is of a ‘totes ridic' size.

In fact, considering just how much content the core game offers, it seems kind of crazy that CD Projekt Red would be putting out an expansion to make it even bigger, but they certainly did, and there's no two ways about it… Hearts of Stone is an add-on that raises the bar for add-ons.

Although it doesn't offer new lands to explore, this DLC does introduce new locations, a new type of craftsman who can enchant weapons and armor, new quests, more gear, and some great characters.

The first newcomer is a female medic named Shani, whom Geralt apparently has some history with. I didn't play the previous two Witcher games and haven't read the books, so she was unfamiliar to me, but I like her quite a bit and she was used well in the story.

The other new character is a magician of sorts named Gaunter O'Dimm, and he's something else. While players have already met him in the main game, I'd be surprised if anyone recalls doing so since there's absolutely nothing memorable about him until Hearts of Stone. Afterwards, he's impossible to forget.

The main questline will take Geralt roughly 10 hours, and is a perfect example of what makes Witcher 3 such an outstanding experience. Rather than delivering time-consuming busywork or fetchquests, nearly every activity offers unique and interesting content. While I won't spoil it all here, the highlights for me were taking a ghost out for one last night on the town, and planning an Ocean's 11-style heist with a group of criminals.

The stuff on offer here is every bit as good as the main game, and the stuff in the main game is excellent. Also, much respect goes out to the developers for genuinely giving players some choice–after I completed the content I discussed my adventure with others, and nearly everyone had something different to say. That goes double for the ending.

Although I spent about 120 hours on Witcher 3 before I got to Hearts of Stone, I was more than happy to jump into it, and what I got was another big chunk of some of the best role-playing in memory. It's so good, in fact, that I'm still eager for more. It's a good thing that the next expansion, Blood and Wine, is coming soon… Rating: 9 out of 10

Disclosures: This game was obtained via paid download and reviewed on the PS4. Approximately 12 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the content was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game contains: blood and gore, intense violence, nudity, strong language, strong sexual content and use of alcohol. They're not wrong.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing: There's plenty of subtitles to help out, which is good as there's a ton of dialogue throughout. Standard situational awareness issues apply, but it does a great job of catering to players less able to hear battle cries and the like for the most part.

The post The Witcher 3: Hearts Of Stone Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Snowball fight!

LOW A character I liked showed up in the final showdown to immediately die.

WTF Wait, so the Wild Hunt has been chasing Ciri the whole game but now we need to find a magic thingmabob to get them to show up?

Western RPGs, especially contemporary ones in the open-world style, are built on the supremacy of player choice. While developers will enforce a story in these games, the player typically gets to control almost every aspect of who the main character is.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt fits into this mold structurally, but it differs in that its main character is pre-defined. Geralt of Rivia is a witcher, a man mutated to have sharpened senses and heightened reflexes so he can defend his fellow men (who hate him for his mutations) from monsters. This changes the game's core question. Where most Western RPGs ask "what is it like to live in this world?", Wild Hunt asks "what is it like to be this person?".

So what is it like to be Geralt of Rivia? What is it like to have his abilities? Wild Hunt offers up its own version of Assassin's Creed's "Eagle Vision", where pulling a trigger allows the player to use enhanced senses to track footprints, smells, and the sounds of distant allies and foes. This gets the job done well enough, but only when Geralt has a specific quest to perform. One never gets the impression that Geralt could pick some random fellow and track him across the world.

Geralt of Rivia is also one of the finest swordsmen in the world, and Wild Hunt tries to substantiate this with a combat style that relies heavily on dodging, evasion, and timely parries for maximum effect. This system evidently aims for an elegant dance of battle, but the practical effect is more like the hokey-pokey, primarily because the game is too stingy about allowing Geralt to break an opponent's guard.

Any drunken thug in underpants wielding a stick can perfectly parry, so battle becomes a pattern of inching forward and back, left and right, until the enemy opens himself up. Geralt's array of magic powers ameliorate the tedium but never entirely eliminate it. The problem only gets worse on higher difficulties, which are foolishly defined by making Geralt even weaker with respect to his enemies.

If we can't understand what it's like to have this fellow's body, maybe we can at least appreciate what it's like to have his job. Wild Hunt is more creditable here, ensuring that the player has access to Geralt's encyclopedic knowledge of wicked creatures and ways to slay them. At the same time, by (rightly) making monsters significantly more dangerous than normal people, the game requires the player to use that knowledge. Swallowing the right potions and using the right blade oil makes battles significantly easier at low difficulty, and becomes essential on the higher ones. Against monsters, too, the occasional sense of whittling away at a life bar feels less odious. They're monsters; Geralt has been extensively mutated precisely because they're so hard to kill.

This speaks to an unresolved tension in the design. On the one hand, Wild Hunt wants its fights to require the same kind of tactical thinking and preparation as a Souls game. On the other, it wants Geralt to fight two dozen bandits on a beach. The game's systems satisfy the first demand, even if it occasionally looks silly, but they fall apart in the face of the second.

Wild Hunt is also strong when it comes to depicting the mundane stresses of Geralt's job. The people who employ him regularly omit or distort facts to suit their needs or hide their misdeeds. The constant sense that Geralt doesn't know enough or that he's being manipulated plays to the paranoia of the game's politics and the core mystery that's intended to drive the story for half its length. This is important because Wild Hunt is exceptionally good, especially early on, at letting the player in on Geralt's anxieties.

In the vast regions of Novigrad and Velen, atmosphere and quests come together to outline the interior life of the character. His uncertainty about the consequences of reuniting with his erstwhile "daughter" Ciri and his longtime lover Yennefer are drawn out by the events of Velen, especially in the "Bloody Baron" quest chain. His fear of the political state of the world and the danger it poses to his friends is articulated by the violent phobias in Novigrad.

Were these the game's only main areas it might have been a singular triumph. Unfortunately, in its third area, Skellige, Wild Hunt loses its way. The pointless vastness of the region makes exploring and traversing a thankless bore of a task. Here the game also wastes much of the tension it previously develops by making Yennefer seem too unpleasant to worry about losing. The complicated relationship with Yennefer is one of Geralt's core motivations, but the game fails at establishing either his passion or the romance's complexity, in part because it denies Yennefer the opportunity to be, as she is in the source books, as unfaithful as Geralt.

Wild Hunt does better with outlining Geralt's feelings towards Ciri, when she finally shows up. The way the game assembles seemingly-small decisions in his dealings with her into major changes in her character and the world is one of its best aspects, giving a sense of real weight and consequence to actions without tumbling into silly dichotomies. The game also creates sympathy for Ciri by giving the player chances to act as her. Even better, these moments of play make it clear that Geralt's desire is not so much to defend Ciri as to assist in her self-defense.

The goal, ultimately, is to save Ciri from the game's titular antagonists, the Wild Hunt themselves. Alas, they're a bust.

When the Wild Hunt shows up, they provide a stiff challenge and they get a powerful villain moment in the middle of the game. Still, their appearances are sparse and even on the critical path, the game is dozens of hours long. These teleporting skull-helmeted riders should feel like an omnipresent threat, something constantly pushing Geralt to find and protect Ciri. Instead, I ended up entirely forgetting about them for vast swaths of the game.

In part that's a consequence of the design: pressure is antithetical to the spirit of open-world games. However, that doesn't mean it's impossible to give the impression that the screws are being turned. If the Wild Hunt started boiling out of portals in the wilderness to attack Geralt every once in a while, the pressure would be on, but Wild Hunt takes the opposite approach–instead of worrying that they'll show up, Geralt spends a lot of time working hard to get them to do just that.

In many ways, the scope of Wild Hunt defeats its purpose. In Velen and Novigrad, the scale seems bracing, but by the time the game hits Skellige, the size feels oppressive. The vast ocean of content that fills that world saps the core narrative of needed urgency and direction, and without an effective antagonist to endanger Ciri, or a compelling romance to draw Geralt towards Yennefer, Wild Hunt ultimately fails to establish the core of the character. Nonetheless, Wild Hunt features sharp choices that use its world and secondary quests to illuminate the inner life of its main character. For a while, at least, we see Geralt from the inside, and know what it's like to be the mutant who's almost always the most human person in the room. Rating: 8 out of 10

Disclosures: This game was obtained via retail purchase and reviewed on the PS4. Approximately a bazillion hours of play was devoted to single-player modes and the game was completed.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing: An addendum here: since its release, The Wild Hunt has been updated with a mode to assist colorblind individuals trying to use Geralt's enhanced senses.

The post The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Second Opinion appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH Going on one hell of a bender in the company of some old friends.

LOW The combat remains lamentably dull, and there's a ton of it.

WTF Thinking Geralt had named his horse after Vernon Roche for the first ten hours or so.

Geralt of Rivia is back!

The White Wolf's been traveling here and there since the close of Witcher 2, and now he's on a quest to track down his old flame, Yennefer of Vengerberg. Yen's not his real goal, though–he needs her help to find his adopted daughter who's being chased by a murderous group of ne'er-do-wells known as the Wild Hunt.

If nothing else, Geralt's life is never simple or boring.

Unsurprisingly, given CD Projekt Red's track record, the level of detail lavished on The Witcher 3 is exceptional. It's a rough-and-tumble dark fantasy with plenty of blood, guts, occasional torture and plenty of casual racism being flung around by the inhabitants. The voice acting is of a generally high standard, and little things like how characters react during dialogue does a lot to lend the interactions an air of realism. It is admittedly quite weird that Geralt (the most feared and infamous Witcher in all the land) is constantly antagonized by idiot peasants who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag, but hey. They're idiot peasants, after all.

One of the most obvious changes over the previous installment (aside from the realtime beard growth) is that the world is no longer tightly constrained to small areas with limited opportunities for exploration. Now everything takes place in a huge–and by huge I mean bloody massive–open map, with many opportunities to stray from the beaten path and engage in a near-countless number of sidequests, minigames and impromptu expeditions.

At first this expanded scope is great, providing players with dozens of reasons to gallop across the land, righting wrongs (or possibly wronging rights), getting into scraps with fearsome beasts, clearing bandit camps, rescuing captives, and more. The problem is that there's so damn many of these jobs that their pursuit eventually becomes immensely boring. By the time I arrived at the game's fourth area (Skellige) I had to start ignoring all the secondary quests and points of interest on the map or I'd have lost my damn mind.

In fact, quest burnout had set in so strongly that I ended up taking a break from the game, and hopping back on the wagon took significantly more effort than expected. I thought I'd be back to it in a few days, but those days became weeks before I mustered up enough enthusiasm to return. I'm glad I did because the payoff was worth it, but bloody hell… The Witcher 3 came much closer to being permanently shelved than I'd like to admit.

One contributing factor to this fatigue is that even though there are usually story snippets attributed to them, many quests require only a perfunctory investigation before killing monsters or putting bad guys in their place. The combat, whilst undeniably better than previous Witcher titles, still isn't good enough to remain interesting throughout a game of this size. The skill trees aren't varied enough, the AI is too predictable, and Geralt's brand of flashy swordsmanship removes the immediacy between pressing a button and watching him stab something in the face. The spells provided (known as signs) do little to help liven up the generally samey combat.

That said, Geralt's journey remains interesting in a multitude of ways. There are plenty of well-written characters encountered during his travels, and there are even a few that don't want to stick a knife in his guts. Old friends like Zoltan, Dandelion and various other Witchers help make his path in life more than an all-out slaughterfest, and there's a good supporting cast from all walks of life for him to butt heads with. For instance, the Bloody Baron excels as a self-appointed warlord with a spotty past, and even the less-nuanced, smaller characters like lowlife gang leader Whoreson Junior add welcome spice.

The moments when players take control of Geralt's adopted daughter Ciri are what really shined for me, though. She's a badass, interesting, entirely likeable character, and her few sections feel more tense than the majority of Geralt's ventures. I'd love to elaborate, but it's all quite firmly planted in spoiler territory.

Overall, it's a story well worth playing through, and the final ending can differ in various ways depending on Geralt's actions. The fate of many individuals and even entire settlements are determined by the player's choices, but the sequences that mattered most were those firmly tied into the main storyline–with one small exception being a missable sidequest involving the kingdom of Redania's future.

So, despite its overlong running time and the malaise that delayed this review, it has to be said that I did enjoy my time with The Witcher 3… but not enough to return to it any time soon, nor to be interested in with any of the upcoming downloadable content. Given that the game already has too much content in its vanilla release, it's more refinement that I'd like to see now–and to be fair, few developers offer post release support like CD Projekt Red do. In this massive adventure the good largely outweighs the bad, but it's a shame that they're so closely intertwined from start to finish. Rating: 7.5 out of 10.

Disclosures: This game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 105 hours of play was devoted to single-player modes (completed 1 time) and there are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game contains: blood and gore, intense violence, nudity, strong language, strong sexual content and use of alcohol. They're not wrong. In fact, they undersold the amount of awesome carnage and copious ass kicking to be found within.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing: There's plenty of subtitles to help out, which is good as there's a ton of dialogue throughout. Standard situational awareness issues apply, but it does a great job of catering to players less able to hear battle cries and the like for the most part.

The post The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The inexplicably detailed and believable dwarven city of Vergen.

LOW Killing a family of friendly trolls and feeling really bad about it.

WTF "King, command your vulture to shut his beak before I thrust his cockerel up his ass and twist so hard he'll crow until noon reverts to morning."

When The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings first graced PCs in May of last year, many of us exclusive to console games were left more than a little envious. After being hailed by critics for its smart storytelling, complicated combat system and excellent presentation, it was impossible not to clamor for the Xbox 360 port that has arrived nearly a year later. While a simple port would've been sufficient, CD Projekt RED has shown a desire to outdo what was already great with the Enhanced Edition. In addition to what was already patched for the PC version, it has been loaded with all sorts of new areas, characters, and cut-scenes. By making such precise tweaks coupled with large-scale additions, this new and improved version of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings has proven to be worth every minute of the eleven month wait.

Perhaps one of the best things that can be said about The Witcher 2 is the fact that the plot can't be summed in one or two sentences without cutting some serious corners. Geralt of Rivia is a witcher, a mutated human who has both the knowledge and combat skills to battle almost any type of monster and defeat it. Recognizing his power, aristocrats and kings have enlisted him for protection during times of political upheaval and war. Beyond that, the depth of the story, particularly the motivations of the characters, goes far beyond what I've come to expect from video game storytelling.

The factor of the story that best fuels The Witcher 2's excellence is undoubtedly the characters. While this usually means I found them to be likeable, the people I met in this game go far beyond that. They're possibly the most believable characters in any game I've ever played, regardless of whether or not they were on the side of Geralt.

Many Western role-playing games (RPGs) make the mistake of having character interactions be almost exclusively one-on-one between him/her and the main character, never forming an overall group dynamic. In Mass Effect 2, for example, I felt that while Shepard got to know all of the characters, the characters never got to know each other. As strange as it may seem, some of the most important moments in The Witcher 2 are ones where Geralt is relaxing in a tavern with his friends, old and new, watching the colorful cast's interactions with each other. It takes a certain type of craftsmanship to make a mutated human and a group of dwarves getting drunk in an inn actually seem realistic, but CD Projekt RED has done it.

Beyond these subtle moments, the key to The Witcher 2's excellent characterization is its mastery of gray morality. There are no real villains in this game, nor are there any real heroes. There's no generic evil force to battle like in Dragon Age: Origins or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, meaning that the conflicts in the plot are much more political and realistic. Every major character in the game can be on Geralt's side at one point or another, which is a testament to how relatable their motivations are. It didn't matter if the character in question was the leader of an elven terrorist group, a power-hungry king who casually talks about raping women, or a drunk troll that charges people to cross a bridge that doesn't even exist, they all exude enough humanity to make me at least somewhat interested in helping them. The emotional impact these characters had on me never reached the level of a game like Lost Odyssey, but in terms of making the characters feel like real people, The Witcher 2 excels. BioWare talked a lot about gray morality and understandable villains in Dragon Age II, but CD Projekt RED has shown them how it's done.

The way this game made me care about so many different characters fits perfectly with another thing The Witcher 2 does brilliantly: letting the player make decisions with major consequences. This isn't like Mass Effect 3, where decisions don't really amount to much later on. Instead, at the end of the first act, the game says to the player, "Things are getting really serious, really fast. Pick a side. Now." The degree to which my first two playthroughs differed is incredible, with the second act taking place in entirely different locations and meeting a ton of different characters. While I wouldn't say it's required, anyone who doesn't do a second playthrough of The Witcher 2 is going to miss out on an entire game's worth of great writing, characters, and combat scenarios.

Combat in The Witcher 2 is composed of three pillars: swordsmanship, magic, and alchemy. Swordsmanship is my favorite due to how fluid the sword combat feels, allowing Geralt to switch targets on the fly and redirect his flurries accordingly. The magic complements the swordplay, letting the player quickly pull off a spell for making shields, throwing fire, or creating shockwaves, to name a few. Alchemy is the pillar I used the least, although I've talked to some people who swear it has the best skill tree in the game. It improves how well Geralt throws bombs and knives, sets traps, and creates potions.

The combat can be very challenging and unforgiving, which will certainly turn off some people who aren't used to games that push back so much. Fortunately, I'm not one of those people, which is why I took on the game's mightiest foes with masochistic glee. The combat is skill-based, allowing anyone willing to learn the mechanics the ability to handle any battle. Since players can save anywhere outside of combat, death doesn't usually lead to replaying a lot of content like in Dark Souls.

The Witcher 2 is one of those rare games that has little interest in pandering to those who struggle, and has no response to those asking for a reprieve from a challenging fight other than "Stop whining and deal with it." This may not be the approach I'd like every game to take, but with the continuing trend of games sacrificing the need for skill and strategy in order to reach the biggest audience, it's refreshing to play a game that knows exactly what it is. Even when playing on the highest difficulty, (which is called "Dark", for some reason) I found the combat mechanics more than capable of getting me through the most brutal battles.

It's obvious at this point that there are a lot of things about this game that Mike and I both like. One opinion we don't share, however, is about how the game ended. He mentioned a lot of exposition at the end, but even after three playthroughs I still had to check out a YouTube video to figure out what he was talking about. To me, it made perfect sense that the character Geralt talks to at the end would have all this knowledge, and so trickling it out sooner would've felt more forced. Getting these answers regarding Geralt's mysterious past made the ending feel rewarding and conclusive. Besides that, most of the dialogue with the final character is additional detail that the player doesn't need to understand the story. It's there for people who want everything clearly explained, but those who jump straight into the fight with this character should still get what's happening in the plot. This might just be a difference of taste with storytelling, but I thought the gravity of the final conversation served the game well.

Flaws with gameplay are miniscule, but still bothersome.

There are a couple times where the player takes control of a character other than Geralt, which could've been a cool change of pace if the execution was less poor. These characters feel stiff and lack Geralt's magic abilities, doing away with what made the combat so great. Targeting outside of combat can be incredibly finicky, to the point that I'd be standing directly in front of a person I wanted to talk to and instead would be stuck targeting a nearby barrel. Finally, there was a boss in the second act that didn't allow me to save right before starting the fight, so I'd have to redo a difficult fight with several enemies as one of the aforementioned stiff alternate characters every time I died to the boss. It's a surprising oversight, since the other boss fights all auto-saved right before starting. These complaints aren't egregious, but still worth mentioning.

After observing the complaints of the PC version, CD Projekt RED has crafted one of the smartest, toughest, and flat-out best RPGs of this generation with the excellent The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition. It succeeds at telling a mature, complex story without worrying about confusing anyone not paying attention, while the skillful, varied, and challenging combat serves to make the gameplay some of the most rewarding in the genre. All of this 2012's upcoming RPGs should be worried, as The Witcher 2 is a tough act to follow. Rating: 8.5 out of 10.

Disclosures: This game was obtained via retail purchase and reviewed on the Xbox 360. Approximately 70 hours were put into the game, and it was completed three times. There is no multiplayer.

Deaf and Hard of Hearing: All dialogue lines are subtitled, although one issue is that the subtitles for ambient lines appear over the NPC's heads rather than at the bottom of the screen, so they can be easy to overlook. That being said, all important dialogue lines are clearly subtitled where you can see it.

The post The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition Second Opinion appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The moment when the combat clicks and Geralt slices through five or more attackers with ease.

LOW Twenty minutes of pure exposition before the game's final moments. Very clunky.

WTF Being tossed into the story with no clue who any of these people are if you didn't play the first game.

In a world where experienced gamers complain that modern releases require players to do little more than "push the win button," CD Projekt RED's The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition is like a throwback to another era–one where men were men and games were hard.

When the PC version was released last year, it quickly joined the ranks of titles like Demon's Souls in the modern pantheon of "games that will kick your ass." For weeks after its debut, message boards and Twitter feeds were filled with complaints about the game's brutal difficulty–and the way it tossed players out into the cold, unfeeling world with little in the way of guidance. Some of those issues have been addressed in the recently released Xbox 360 port of the game (which brings along the tutorial added in the 2.0 PC version to ease players into the action-oriented combat), but rest assured–The Witcher 2 is still a challenging experience that will make players pay for every mistake in the early stages.

In fact, it's those first few hours of The Witcher 2 that are the biggest hurdle to entry across the board. Between the combat that can lead to death in any encounter and a story that tosses players into Geralt of Rivia's world without much explanation as to who's who or why they're doing what they're doing, the early stages of the game can be a bit off-putting. Those who persevere will be rewarded with a deep action role-playing game (RPG) experience, but not one without some flaws.

Since the first Witcher title was a PC only experience, Xbox 360 owners are coming into the game without any previous knowledge. While the opening act featuring badass swordmaster Geralt helping a king storm a castle is exciting, it's hard for players to become completely invested with no background information. I'm all in favor of games starting in medias res, but even when things slow down, the game rarely does much explaining about what's going on. That's unfortunate, since a huge part of the allure of The Witcher 2 lies in the fact that it features a narrative that is more mature than those often found on consoles.

In time, players will manage to piece together the main plotline. There's an assassin about–and he's got his eye on the kings of the North Lands. When Geralt is unjustly accused of the crimes, he sets out to clear his name and learns that the kingslayer might be another Witcher.

The assassination plotline serves as the overarching narrative, but like all good RPGs, The Witcher 2 offers up plenty of diversions in the form of sidequests. Tackling these jobs off the main narrative path leads not only to experience and loot, but also serves to flesh out the game world, often adding insight to events happening in the core story.

Getting to know Geralt's world is important, because the Witcher will be forced to make a series of decisions which directly affect the political landscape around him. Companies like BioWare have been touting games with choices and morality bars for years, but CD Projekt RED has taken narrative choice to a different level in the game. The options are never black or white–Geralt often finds himself choosing between varying shades of grey. The world of The Witcher 2 is a dark and dangerous place, one filled unlikeable characters with their own agendas, and much like the real world, the decisions are often about choosing the lesser of two evils.

With no clear-cut rights and wrongs, there's a unique sense of freedom to the experience–and significant replay value. One major decision closes off an entire half of the game. More importantly, the decisions feel weighty. I've played tons of RPGs where I was asked to make choices–but none has ever given me pause in quite the way this one did. I spent fifteen minutes at one critical moment, weighing pros and cons and extrapolating potential outcomes even though I knew neither choice was inherently "wrong." This sets the game apart from titles like Dragon Age, where the "good" and "evil" answers seemed far more obvious.

When it comes to battle, Witchers are brilliant swordsmen who can also use alchemical potions to aid them in combat. To truly succeed at the game on the higher difficulty settings, players will have to master not only the swords and potions, but traps, positioning, and countering. The game's encounters are strategic, yet oddly fast-paced and very challenging. When it all "clicks," it's satisfying–but there is a brutal learning curve. Save often, because death lurks in behind every encounter.

Technically, the game is quite an achievement. The Witcher 2 required a fairly powerful gaming rig to run on PC, but somehow they've managed to port it to the ancient Xbox 360 without making major compromises. The game looks great on the console and runs smoothly even in the larger battle sequences. My only real complaints are that it loads frequently when entering buildings, even when installed on the hard drive, and there's a lot of disconcerting texture pop-in.

The biggest issue of all isn't technical, but the way the game ends. Geralt finally meets up with someone he's been looking for throughout the entire game and is tasked with deciding to let the person live and walk away or die by his blade–but before he makes that decision, he can spend twenty minutes talking to this person while they fill him in on every plot detail the game didn't bother to resolve or explain prior to this point.

This exposition dump was my biggest disappointment with The Witcher 2. The game is so focused on its story, the choices, and how all these characters and their motivations interconnect that it's a genuine letdown to see so much of the plot revealed through boring dialogue before a climactic decision. For a game based on a beloved series of Polish fantasy novels, one has to think that CD Projekt RED could have done a better job integrating this information into the narrative instead of just dumping it on the player at the last minute. No author would get away with this–why should a game?

That complaint aside, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition is worthy of the praise it got when it was released on PC last year. The Xbox 360 port is an impressive technical accomplishment that brings a classic PC RPG experience to a new audience. The transition is not flawless, but those who stick with it will be rewarded with an intriguing and entertaining experience. Rating: 7.5 out of 10.

Disclosures: This game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the Xbox 360. Approximately 25 hours of play was devoted to single-player modes (completed 1 time). There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game contains blood and gore, intense violence, nudity, strong language, strong sexual content, use of drugs. Obviously, given the list of ESRB descriptors, The Witcher 2 is not a game for children. This is a violent, gory game with mature themes and several instances of full frontal female nudity. Parents will want to steer their young ones clear of this title.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing: Gamers with hearing issues can approach Assassins of Kings without fear. Dialogue subtitles are available and all the decisions are chosen from text prompts. While hearing impaired gamers will miss out on the game's decent musical score and great voice acting, the game still works.

The post The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Over the last few days, there's been a lot of heat directed at Bobby Hunter, the reviewer who covered Witcher 2 for Gamer Limit.

Full disclosure, I've only played about six hours of Witcher 2. Personally, it wasn't ringing my bell and I didn't feel compelled to play more. I read Bobby's piece since it was the lowest-scored at MetaCritic (I do this for most games I play) and although I didn't finish the game, I found myself agreeing with many of the points he raises.

(I also largely agreed with my fellow critic @RichardNaik in his review of the PC version.)

In any event, the reason I bring this up is not because I agree with the criticisms, but to express a little surprise at how many people in the review sphere seemed eager to take Mr. Hunter to task for any number of reasons; everything ranging from his low score bringing down the Metacritic average and potentially causing a loss of income to the developer, to people who felt that the score was too low despite the site not posting a rubric on their scoring policy. I'm not even going to bring up what was said in the comments posted directly to the review itself.

Even more strangely than those issues, I saw several people complaining that this review had harshly graded The Witcher for not being a hack-and-slash–in fact, Mr. Hunter never states such, only that he says:

"Those coming into the game looking for a simple hack n' slash action RPG will be sorely disappointed."

I don't quite understand how this one sentence could be misinterpreted and extrapolated into the idea that the reviewer docked points for the game not being in a certain genre, but the people who were lighting torches over it should douse them and re-read what he actually said.

I don't know Mr. Hunter, I've never spoken to him, and I have no stake in supporting or defending either his work or Witcher 2, but after seeing the fallout from this review, it seems like we've still got a long way to go…

First of all, the score is just an arbitrary number. Really, that's all it is. There's no standard scale that anyone adheres to unless you want to look towards the "eight is average" overinflation that currently plagues many reviews. So he gave it a 4.5… And what? What "should" it be, and why do we care?

Also, the idea that reviewers should be somehow responsible for the compensation towards developers is absolutely ludicrous. The only responsibility reviewers have is to be honest and to explain their impressions. Any reviewer who takes on the burden of inflating scores so that developers will earn bonuses in accordance with cockamamie publisher metrics needs to stop writing reviews immediately.

Finally, I'd like to applaud Mr. Hunter for being brave enough to go against the current wave of love that Witcher 2 is receiving. To be clear, I'm not saying that the game doesn't deserve it. I haven't seen enough of the game to know, and I don't really have an opinion other than the fact that the first six hours didn't grab me. No, what I'm applauding is that someone decided to express their opinion and give criticism of the current favorite son of critics and players alike. It's a hard thing to take an unpopular stand, but if you ask me, I think that review sphere could use more of it.

As someone who's been playing games for thirty years and writing about them for twelve, I see the same cycle over and over again: a new, hot game comes out. Initial scores are through the roof and critics fall all over themselves to lavish praise. Months (or even weeks) later, lower scores start to trickle in and many of the initial supporters start saying things like "it was good, BUT…" or "Eh, it really wasn't all that…"

I think that if more writers resisted the urge to get caught up in New Game Hype and evaluated titles without fear of repercussions, without fear of lowering the MetaScore, or without fear of being the odd man/woman out, we'd see a much wider range of ratings and viewpoints that more accurately represents the array of opinions that I'm sure are out there. I can only see that as a very healthy thing.

Don't get me wrong , I'm not trying to paint all games writers with one broad brush here. There are certainly people out there fighting the good fight, and there are some writers who I greatly respect for taking the work quite seriously. Without a doubt.

That said, the response from many to this review was still a little surprising, and it just reinforced to me that gamers (and especially reviewers!) have to be okay with the dissenters just as we are with the cheerleaders. There's a world of difference between a review that you disagree with because it's factually wrong or does not support the ideas it presents, and one that you disagree with because you like the game more or less than the author did. If we can't accept that there might be some people out there who have a different, equally-valid opinion, then what hope do reviews have of ever being worth a damn?

The post Burning The Witcher appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH: The death of an NPC I'd wanted to kill since the moment I met him.

LOW: The boss checkpoint that didn't give me a chance to use any potions when I died and respawned.

WTF: The absolute orgy of exposition at the end of the game.

Imagine being invited to a party and upon arrival, you're told to serve drinks and make sure the burgers aren't overcooked. Then, adding insult to injury, you're asked to clean the bathroom before being allowed to mingle and have some fun. In such a situation, one could hardly be blamed for just going home, right? That theoretical party is kind of what The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is like–a confusing, rough start and an incredibly brutal introduction to combat, followed by flashes of brilliance that come only after much tribulation. Unfortunately, those flashes never quite add up to a sustained shine.

Let's start at the beginning. Compared to most other role-playing games (RPGs), Witcher 2 is not user friendly. In fact, it does an absolute piss-poor job of explaining itself, leading to a lot of the frustration in the game's opening scenes.

There are in-game tutorials, but they have a knack for popping up at times when I have more important things to deal with, like being incinerated by a dragon. During these times, I could picture the game staring at me with a disapproving gaze as I died again and again….and again and again and again and again.

Even after I had gotten the hang of things and had become able to deal with most challenges, I was still constantly faced with bafflingly bad design elements like the complete lack of camera zoom capability, or an incredibly frustrating (read: easy to get lost in) series of caves. It became clear that the game was not here to impress me, I was here to impress it.

Beyond the muddled, unclear opening, another major problem presents itself in the combat system. The complex system from the original Witcher has been replaced by a simpler hack n' slash setup that appears to be geared towards the recently-announced console release. This actually represents progress over the old system, but combat is still woefully undercut by flaws serious enough to cause me to turn the difficulty down–something I don't normally do.

Fighting in Witcher 2 is centered around battle preparation in the form of potions. Witchers–magically-enhanced monster hunters–are capable fighters to begin with, but they need a little extra edge in battle. With his alchemy skills, main character Geralt can fashion potions, bombs, mutagens, and other enhancements give him that edge. Problem is, alchemy can only be done outside of battle. If I ran into an unexpected fight, I was just out of luck. While a "try and die" situation isn't necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, every single time I found myself in need of a potion I had to wonder why I couldn't just chug it right then and there. This was especially bad during one particular boss fight, and very few things get under my skin more than a bad boss.

Then there's the actual combat, which is even more problematic than the potion-chugging prep work. Even with the simplified controls, Geralt's actions are extremely sluggish, and there's often a slight delay between when I press a button and when he actually does something. Such a delay can be a massive headache when being attacked from behind does 200% damage, or when I need to throw a bomb to stop an incoming group of Rotfiends.

Worse still, the game has a nasty habit of spiking the difficulty, especially when facing multiple enemies. When up against a large group, there will inevitably be a ton of running around in circles using ranged attacks and bombs (a practice commonly known as kiting), which gets old very fast. I am generally a fan of games that challenge me as opposed to holding my hand, but Witcher 2 was one of the few games where I simply got too aggravated to continue on the Normal setting.

A correctly-made "hard game" has to have mechanics that are smooth and easy to use, so that it can present a challenge to the player by asking him to master those mechanics. For example, I am an unabashed Mega Man fan, and when I die or mess something up playing one, it is because I failed, not because the game failed me. My experience playing Witcher 2 was the exact opposite.

I can't count the number of times I died because the camera was shaking so badly I couldn't see where I was going, or that I pressed the block button only to have Geralt stand there looking confused, or that the auto-targeting decided that I wanted to roll into a horde of lethal Nekkers instead of away from them. Despite some major efforts to make things more palatable, Witcher 2 still suffers from a severe case of Deadly Premonition syndrome, in that playtesting and balance was apparently a huge afterthought. Some may say that Witcher 2 is just a hard game and I need to adapt, but that isn't the case. It's just hard to play.

Of course, there is the matter of those flashes of brilliance I mentioned earlier.

The calling card of the Witcher 2 is the unique way in which it handles player choice. In stark contrast to the usually-transparent Boy Scout/Evil Psychopath choices of its contemporaries, the developers present a giant moral gray area with no NPC approvals or karma meters. Geralt has to navigate a complex landscape rife with intrigue, and there is always more than one facet to any given situation. More often than not, there is no "right" or "wrong" choice — or if there is, it's deftly hidden in a way that requires the player to pay attention and closely analyze the situation. Rather than simply earning new swords or other shining doodads, the consequences of the player's choices are the results within the game world; results which are woven with superb detail into the overall narrative.

However, that narrative just isn't very good.

The story of the Witcher 2 is a sleepy, tired, Tolkien-esque fantasy slog with some softcore porn thrown in. I had a hard time keeping an interest in the game's world (yes, including the porny bits), and it didn't help that the writers assumed a lot of familiarity on my part regarding its details. Based on a popular series of fantasy novels, Witcher 2 presents a lot of people and places that a player won't necessarily be familiar with, and then doesn't do much to introduce them or provide illuminating context. I'm certainly the kind of player that loves digging into a game's lore, but even that didn't help much since the available lore doesn't shed much light on anything. It still feels like there's a lot of stuff that I'm just "supposed" to know. The massive gaps in exposition sapped most of the Witcher's potential dramatic weight, leaving me scratching my head far too often.

I really wanted this game to be better than it actually was. It has the kind of vision that should make it great, but it has far too many problems to overlook. The most frustrating thing is that I could forgive all of those flaws if the game had an engrossing story or rich world to show me, but it fails in that regard as well. The sophisticated ideas here are wasted on such a sloppy product. While it does indeed take a few steps in the right direction, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings doesn't live up to its own ambition. Rating: 5.5 out of 10.

Disclosures: This game was obtained via Steam purchase and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 32 hours of play was devoted to single-player modes (completed 1 time) and there are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game contains blood and gore, intense violence, nudity, strong language, strong sexual content, and use of drugs. Absolutely no punches are pulled here folks. It's bloody, cursing is abundant, and there are several scenes of full-frontal nudity. Adults only.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing: All spoken lines in conversations are subtitled, although you will probably have problems with the ambient dialogue, since sometimes the subtitles for them don't show. Also, the beginning/ending of combat is signaled by music changes, so that may be problematic as well.

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