Sometimes you just don’t have fifty bucks to go out and buy a new game. Sometimes there just isn’t anything that you want to buy. So I’m going to start giving regular reviews of games that are $20 or less, and that can usually be found on Steam.
The Witcher is my first recommendation.
The Witcher is an RPG game. That’s it. It’s not a crappy hybrid that is intended to trick people into playing an RPG. It’s set in a very mature fantasy world. I use the word “mature” with a double meaning. The game is mature in the sense that it’s a deep world, with lots of politics, racists, drugs, and all kinds of other real world problems. It’s also mature in the “Oh F***! That c*** bag just f***ing s*** on my sword! Now I’m gonna have to cut his head off and feed it to his w**** of a wife!” kind of way. That’s right, this game is not for kids! It’s filled with cursing, drugs, blood, violence, prostitutes, sex, and nudity. The world feels very similar to Conan’s Hyboria. It’s not a rip off. The books that this game is based on were written a long time ago, and I’m sure the Polish author had never heard of Conan. The American release of the game was toned down a little bit from the original European version of the game, but a patch was released pretty quickly that uncensored all the naughty bits. (You know that you like that)
The Witcher has the most awesome intro video for a game ever. I mean it. The best of all time… OF ALL TIME! Watch it and agree with me. For all the console gamers in the audience this gives you a good taste of what you missed.
Mechanically the game is great. It looks nice, plays nice, has good combat, great sounds, and the musical score is incredible (if you like metal, there is an album available that is inspired by The Witcher). It’s got a very deep control scheme that might intimidate some users, but once you get used to it, it works very well. I’m not gonna waste time talking about any of this stuff since it’s an old game, but it holds up pretty decent. If you own a PC and like RPGs and haven’t played this game, you are a very sad person indeed. It’s only $20 on Steam so you should go get it now.
The Witcher was lined up to get a port to consoles titled The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf, but the project was scrapped because the game’s engine would not perform on consoles to the quality that CD Projekt RED wanted. It’s not really the consoles fault this time. The Aurora Engine (Bioware’s Neverwinter Night’s engine) scales badly, and is known for crappy frame-rates. Even on PC the game doesn’t perform that great. It looks good, but don’t get upset when you see your FPS drop down to 20.
The Witcher was well received by critics and fans. It has a metric score of 81 from critics, and a 9.3 from users. It received PC RPG game of the year from Gamespy, IGN and PC Gamer Magazine. It sold over 1.5 million copies world wide, which isn’t to shabby for a PC only release. The most impressive part about all the praise that the game received is that The Witcher was CD Projekt RED’s first release. Studios always get better with each release so we can expect good things from The Witcher 2.
So go ahead and pick this one up if your looking for a good, cheap RPG. I give it 9 out of 10. It would give it a perfect 10 if it wasn’t for the frame rate issues.
Keep on Gaming People!
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