Almost 10 years ago I borrowed Baldur's Gate from a friend and I never looked back.
Top down RPGs became first person RPGs in the form of Oblivion, but getting the camera angle right can make all the difference.
You want to be close enough for it to be engaging, yet not have to constantly fiddle with the camera in order to navigate through the world. This is where The Witcher gets it spot on with the Over The Shoulder view.
It also broke the mould in terms of character development. Instead of letting you create an "individual", through tedious "customisations", the culmination of which boiling down to being referred to as a nameless "Him" or "Her" for the next 60+ hours of gameplay. You are given the task of forging the personality of Geralt, a weathered blade for hire, suffering from a convenient bout of amnesia.
Great story, great graphics and no monthly subscription!

I really wanted to like The Witcher, but it took a lot of effort. I bought the game in April, and had to pick it up again a few times - only finishing it five months later. The game isn't too demanding on your PC - although it can slow when you have a *lot* on the screen (this really only happens a few times) - but the downside of this is that it looks a lot like Neverwinter Nights 2 (same graphics engine), which is a bit dated today.

Annoyingly, the enormous spells, combat, potions, oils and bombs-based RPG doesn't come with a printed manual - it's on pdf. Cheap old game manufacturers, eh? It kind of spoils the game, and you end up making a lot of notes, but it'd be really nice to have something to refer back to.

Overall, the setting is nicely dystopian. Medieval castles, peeing mercenaries, leering whores, diseased old women and proud knights - everyone is a little bit bent in this game. And although it's an interesting change, it does leave you feeling a bit like you want to simply kill everyone in the game - they're all a bit evil. There are some delightfully weird (and enormous) monsters - like the bloodsucking creatures in the swamps, the underwater people and the giant centipedes.

Gameplay can be a bit confusing - potions confused me for a while (you need vodka or spirits to make them, I realise) and unlike many RPGs, there's no way of fast-forwarding time without one of the fireplaces liberally strewn around the place, which is a bit annoying at times. Loading times can be a bit slow, and it often feels like you're not really making much progress in the game. Some of the quests are annoyingly trivial - like the entire chapter dedicated to sorting out problems at a wedding. 'Why do I care?' you find yourself asking.

Despite looking a bit dated, the scenery is impressive - the sunsets are great, and the swamp views are very evocative. It's an autumnal game, which is kind of nice. There are some great touches as well - the enormous elven ruins under the city are really impressive, and when it rains, the nobles all hide under the shelter.

The combat is nicely done, and the fighting styles (group, fast and strong) are pretty intuitive. It gets more impressive as you get more experienced, although some of the combat towards the end is really tough. The spells are ok, but you'll probably spend more of your time with your swords out. The quests can be a bit repetitive - lots of to-ing and fro-ing and they can get a bit dull without any real sense of progression. There is an impressive mystery to unfold, but you don't get a real sense of it until right at the end - you spend most of the time thinking that you're pursuing thieves, essentially.

The romance is ok - but it was disappointing that it's not concluded at the end. Although the denouement is impressive, it feels a bit unconclusive, and I had to make a real effort to finish the game. Overall, although there are some nice touches, it can feel very tedious. It's not open ended enough to be oblivion, or closed enough to really feel a sense of progression - I can appreciate what the designers were trying to do, but I just didn't enjoy it that much. Interesting, yes, long, yes, enjoyable - sometimes. But sometimes isn't really enough.

For some reason the beginning really turned me off, but once I got over this I really got into The Witcher. The story is great, and the quest tracker works brilliantly. It also looks great, and should look even better when the new version comes out next month, which by the way is absolutely free if you already own the original. The combat works well, with some extremeley satisfying moves and spells, and you really get your money's worth in terms of gameplay time. The 322mb patch also seems to sort out any stability issues. I'm giving it a five because,so far, I've never enjoyed exploring a fantasy world so much as I have done in The Witcher.

I would say this is the best RPG I've ever played. I think a key test of any RPG is whether its world feels authentic. I feel I have actually lived in Geralt's world and there is no higher recommendation than that.

It seems to me that the developers have looked at Oblivion, taken aboard comments about its shortcomings and set out to eliminate them in The Witcher. It has many of the features which so endeared Oblivion to its fans: good real-time combat, beautiful and detailed urban areas and countryside, great sound effects and atmosphere, interesting characters and missions, a detailed alchemy system. But on top of this the city feels more lifelike: seemingly small features like children and small animals running about, townsfolk running for cover when a downpour starts, add so much more life.

But what really makes The Witcher stand out for me is its black storyline: so much more realistic than the standard fairy-tale RPGs. Thugs and whores are everywhere, townsfolk walk around f-ing and blinding about their lives, Geralt is fond of seducing women wherever he goes and is uncompromising in his dealings with others. He can participate in fistfights and drinking contests in taverns then spend the night with a whore. Who said that sounds like an average night out in the UK?!

The Witcher does have its shortcomings of course. Loading times can be long and I found the frame rate slowed drastically when I reached the Merchant District for the first time, meaning I had to reduce the resolution I was playing at. But I found it mostly runs smoothly and while my PC's spec is good, it's not close to top-end.

I would admit The Witcher is a slow-burner at first but after a few hours play, I was totally immersed. I will be genuinely sad when I complete this game, which I think says it all. Treat yourself and get this game today!

As you can see from that awful pun, humour doth flow from me like a river...
Anyway, the witcher.

The first thing that comes to mind for me when playing the witcher was, oddly enough, Oblivion. But not in the way you might think. The Witcher approaches the RPG genre from almost entirely the opposite direction from Bethesda's Classic. Rather than a sprawling, completely open world, we are instead given a handful of enclosed areas to explore through, with invisible walls keeping us on the right path. Instead of a traditional fantasy world of black and white morality and gorgeous scenary, we have a low fantasy setting full of corruption, shades of grey and shadowy, grimy cities (This is the best I've seen the Aurora engine looking) . That's not to say that either approach is bad, it's just that they're different approaches to the genre.

Oblivion had so many side-quests and faction questlines, that the main quest frequently got forgotten, and only picked up occasionally. In The Witcher however, we are given a far more story-led game. Almost all the sidequests focus around the central points of the main one, either being necessary to advance it further, or providing some background information on the current situation, and I really like it. It managed to bestow a sense of purpose to the main character, and feels like you're steadily progressing towards your goal, unlike in Oblivion where the end of the world seemed content to wait until you were ready to combat it.

The 'Witcher' of the title is Geralt; a human mutated by constant ingestion of potions that eventually create a witcher - a proffesional monster hunter with abilities far beyond normal humans, who is immune to disease, highly resistant to poisons etc. Obviously, the secrets to creating a Witcher must be attractive to outsiders, which is why someone attempts to steal them pretty much the moment Geralt wakes up from his coma with no recollection of his past life. As the story progresses, Geralt must hunt down those responsible, and retrieve the mutagens, whilst uncovering more of his past, and steadily re-learning his abilities (leveling up!). From the offset, the plot seems altogether bland and generic, and indeed continues to seem so for the first chapter or so. After that, however, the plot begins to twist and turn like a drunk on a pogo stick.

This is actually a recurring theme, and problem with the witcher, it seems to have the view that fun is something to be unlocked, rather than given to you from the start. A perfect example is the combat, whereby you click to attack an enemy, then click again, when the sword icon turns to a flame to perform the same attack again and again and again. This means that for a good portion of the game, you're stuck with very dull combat, and it was only later, when you level your style skills, that more interesting animations are used. I will admit that by level 5 in each style, you do look awesome, pirouetting through a swarm of enemies, your sword slashing from all directions, but it takes you so long to be able to do this, which is a real shame.

While the combat claims to be tactical, there is really very little to it, other than clicking at the right moment. You have 2 swords, and 3 styles for each, but only 1 sword and style is actually any good at killing each individual monster, so appart from using group style when there's 3 or more, there's generally not much to it. If you can't get past a fight, then the solution is usually simply to drink more potions before entering combat. Having said that, the signs (Aard, Igni, Yrden, Quen, Axii) are very nicely designed, and give the combat an extra dash of flavour. The aard knocks enemies back, the igni is a direct damage flame attack, the yrden creates a magical trap on the ground, the quen creates a magical shield around the player and the axii turns weak-minded enemies to your side, which is why it's so baffling that by the time you actually GET the axii sign, it's completely useless - anything it works on dies in about 3 hits. The other four are brilliant though, each also has an alternative effect caused by holding right mouse to power up the sign before release. Combining them effectively with the potions and general combat makes it interesting, but it's only ever a genuine challenge on the hardest difficulty setting.

Character progression is done rather nicely, at each level up you gain talents, which are required to unlock the next level of a style, sign or attribute, or to add abilities or effects to the styles of signs. Unless you train yourself up outside of the quests, you won't manage to unlock all of them, but you can unlock enough to make tailor Geralt to do pretty much what you want, and it's an incredibly simple and effective system overall.

As I mentioned earlier, the world you find yourself in is full of shades of grey, and quite often it's difficult to make a choice between them. The two main factions are the Scoi'atel and the Order of the Flaming rose, and at several points in the game, you must choose between them. The problem is, there's very little to differentiate them early on, the Scoi'atel are non-human freedom fighters, responding to the horrific racism heaped upon them, but at the same time, their methods are starting to resemble the humans that they fight against. And the order are quinissential good guys, but they've taken a stand against the Scoi'atel. The two factions frequently clash, and you have to make the really hard choice between which you support.
Thankfully, the early skirmishes don't mean as much in the later game, and when it finally does matter, you can do what Geralt would do when given the choice between a greater and a lesser evil, which is not choose. The downside, is theat your neutrality causes them both to turn against you, ah well. I am impressed by the moral choices that the game throws at you, the consequences are often quite far reaching, and there is the odd moment when you have to choose between doing good and doing what is actually profitable to you, which I really respect.

The dark world of the witcher is clearly one geared towards mature players, which presumably is why every character swears constantly, and ever woman in the game uses sex as a way to finish sentances. The sheer amount of sex in the witcher is actually to it's detriment in my opinion. Whilst I have no problems with it in moderation, the fact that most of the women will jump you if you give them a bread loaf seems to rather break the realism somewhat - not to mention that you get a card depicting your conquest, which seems a wee bit misogynistic to me. In fact, in the entire game, only one character actually reacts in a vaguelly logical way to your constant shagging, and that is Shani (and the prostitutes, technically). Which is why, I eventually chose to take my relationship with her further, which actually becomes an almost touching love story, at least until you have a threesome in the second to last chapter *rolls eyes*.

Other than that, the characterisation is relatively well done, nothing special though, and the voice acting is definatly better than Oblivions, but is otherwise marred by there being VERY few character models outside of the main characters. It somewhat breaks the immersion when you're talking to someone, and you see their twin walking past in the background. It also doesn't help that the dialog seems somewhat broken, but apparently this is going to be remedied in a patch later this year, so I will have to wait and see what that's like.

All told The Witcher is simply a good game, rather than a great game. The good ideas take a little to long to appear, and whilst playing it there is a string of constant problems. None of them are ever really enough to stop the game being fun, they just hold it back from being a classic. With luck, The Witcher 2 will improve on this.