Sure is quiet in here.
Come BritGAF, regail me with tales of your bank holiday activities.
For my sins I am working today, though it's quiet right now.
Enjoying the Witcher 3: Witch'em Up immensely. Very impressed with it. I mean, I was impressed before I even put the disk in my PS4, the game actually came with a manual and a little thank you note from CDPR for buying the game. Nice touch. Why is it a rare grace to actually get a manual in the box these days? Declining standards.
But really the game is very good. Proportions and geography of the world feel realistic, dynamic touches make a big difference as well. Little things like the trees swaying and creaking in the wind go a long way. Some of the weather on display is glorious too, really vibrant sunsets and such. The characters in the world are good as well, well written and they look the part. Lots of impressively weathered looking peasants about.
Geralt plays the part of gruff but more or less well intentioned badass well. Normally with games like these I like to create my own character but the custom/pre-written character approaches each have their own strengths and weaknesses.
The combat is pretty good. Not a massive amount of depth to it, a lot of fights come down to the same formula of dodging/rolling and mashing fast attack, rinse and repeat and occasionally use Signs. Obviously that's a little unfair as some of the more intimidating enemies like Noonwraiths can only be damaged within certain spellfields and really require you to get involved with stuff like applying oils. But for the most part it's a matter of waiting for the enemy to expose themselves and then punishing them. Still, I appreciate that you are very vulnerable actually, even low level enemies can kill you with a few too many hits.
One very cool thing is the way that many of these tougher opponents are set up as quests, often you end up uncovering a whole backstory to characters and villages involved that adds an extra layer of context, it's rarely just "go there and kill that". In fact there's very little of the lame fetch quest stuff as you'd expect from an open world RPG. I did have to bring back someone's goat at one point but overall the quality of the quests is very good.
I even really like the mini game they've made up for it, Gwent. To the extent that any time I visit a new town or village I seek out the innkeepers or blacksmiths I can beat to get more cards.
So having played maybe ten hours or more over the weekend my preliminary rating for this interactive experience is R for "really foookin good, like".
