esliang said:
I'm really not sure how seriously to take this review...Yahtzee's pretty insightful but can this game really be that tedious? I've always kind of wanted to try it.
Nope, it
is quite hard, and it doesn't have any sort of hand-holding tutorial and sort of expects you to notice you have a bunch of abilities and start the game with bombs and traps and therefore figure out that you should, you know,
use them without being prompted, but there's an answer for pretty much all the problems people seem to have with it: There is a setting labeled "Easy".
Which is, shockingly enough, easy - you'll still die quite a lot if you approach the game like a typical hack-and-slash, but you'll generally be able to live through one or two mistakes. A lot of which arise because the combat system doesn't work like people think it does - you can actually change directions mid-roll when evading, and the targeting is based on where you have the mouse pointed at the time, not by pressing a direction button and clicking. Once you've figured that out combat starts to flow in a way very reminiscent of Batman: Arkham Asylum, with Geralt smoothly transitioning from one foe to the next while evading attacks.
And of course there are plants and materials practically everywhere, which you can pick up and then make tons of potions and bombs. Yahtzee's complaints about the overlong "drinking potions" animation are actually spot on, and you can't use them unless you enter "meditation mode" first (there aren't quite as many steps as he suggests it takes though, that was comedic exaggeration), but the average player will have acquired so many ingredients (with plant parts being weightless so there's no reason not to pick every mushroom or flower you see) that there's no reason you should ever need to walk out of town without say... Swallow and Rook up (plus maybe a Tawny Owl). There are a lot of potion recipes and a bunch of them involve tradeoffs and can be combined in novel ways, but in general you can't really go wrong with vitality regeneration, extra damage, and faster stamina regeneration (all with no penalties).
Also,
bombs - you can make tons of those things and they do AoE, and with bombs like Samum there's a chance to stun, in addition to the straight damage they deal. Stunning is great because attacks against a stunned opponent trigger an insta-kill animation that also renders Geralt invincible while it's playing, which makes the Aard sign far more useful than the knockdown and minor damage it
always does would suggest. Traps can also be quite useful and come in a similarly bewildering variety of flavors, and throwing daggers do
ridiculous amounts of damage - so much so that you can defeat the game's final (possible) opponent in seconds simply by tossing those at him (which is why players looking for a challenge are advised not to, heh). A lot of games teach or otherwise encourage us to hoard our inventories or avoid "cheap" tactics, but The Witcher 2 is a game that gives you this varied toolbox and expects you to actually use it; wading into a hoard of enemies and thinking you'll be able to simply hack and slash your way to victory is a sure-fire trip to the Game Over screen.
As for the complaint about the first major boss, you can skip all the cutscenes, generally simply by left clicking or pressing Space - the longer ones bring up a small "Press Right Mouse Button to skip" prompt if you do that though; right-clicking at that point then skips the cutscene like normal. If you
didn't mean to click through the cutscene (and I quite frequently click the mouse accidentally while watching cutscenes), the on-screen prompt goes away after a few seconds and you don't have to reload to watch a cutscene you've accidentally skipped through, so I like that they make you "confirm" it on the longer and more elaborate scenes. Yahtzee must have either missed that prompt or chose to claim there's a 5-minute (not true) unskippable cutscene (also not true) because that sounds funnier than the reality (very true).
If you've been interested in the game I would certainly not let this critique dissuade you from playing it - a lot of people were turned off of the first one thanks to Yahtzee likening it to a single-player MMORPG only to learn that he was full of it when someone else actually convinced them to sit down and play it. Yahtzee didn't really harp on any faults that all the various review sites heaping glowing praise on the game didn't already point out in their own very favorable reviews, so it's not like everyone else is willfully overlooking those points and Mr. Sarcastic fast-talking British fellow is the only one telling it like is: he just doesn't
like the game, while quite a lot of other people do.
Edit: Enhancements are actually extremely easy to figure out - the game will highlight any of the various slots (hands, feet, legs, armor, steel sword, silver sword, trophy, and a row for "pockets") when you have an item in your inventory that applies to those slots highlighted - to use enhancements you simply drag and drop them onto the armor/weapon you want to enhance (weapons and armor that can be enhanced have little empty circles indicated enhancement slots that fill up when you apply them), then say yes when it asks if you really want to do that.
Mutagens though could have been designed better - you have to be in the character progression screen and have an ability with a mutator slot highlighted before the context option to apply a mutagen appears, and since not every ability on the character screen has those slots it isn't readily apparent that you even have that option at first. Also the button only appears while the mouse is over the icon for the upgradable skill, but they put the button along the bottom side of the screen so you can't actually click it
with the mouse, and will have to push the key-binding that it indicates (it defaults to Enter). I'm hoping that and a few other interface niggles (like no "junk" tab despite a junk category of inventory items, retaining useless quest items after things like the doors they unlocked are long behind you, and the absurdly slow scroll rate for recipes and crafting diagrams that makes you wait for ages to see what ingredients a recipe/diagram you don't own will require[footnote]If you do have a diagram it adds an entry in the journal under the crafting tab, which displays all the relevant info on one screen, so at least it's only really aggravating while you're shopping.[/footnote]) will be patched out like some of the other things they've already addressed (among them the difficulty of the prologue, supposedly they've made it easier).
canadamus_prime said:
Hmmm, sounds about as dull as the first game.
And incidentally I'm not a console gamer or a PC gamer, I'll play games on anything that plays games.
Nothing could be further from the truth - obviously I was someone who actually liked the first game, so I wouldn't have called it dull to begin with, but there were definitely slower sections and parts that dragged on a bit. I could certainly understand how people approaching it with a different mindset than mine would find the whole thing tedious though.
But the sequel "dull"? Yeah, that's a load of bollocks. You may still end up not liking it, but it won't be because the game is dull - compared to the original it is ridiculously fast-paced and engaging (it's about par for the course in terms of other action RPGs); just about everything apart from the characters and setting has changed, mechanically it's an entirely different game. Yahtzee just doesn't ever really bother mentioning that fact in this pitiful attempt at a review (but extremely successful attempt at a comedy video, it was quite funny if not particularly informative).
