This review has given me headaches. Even though The Witcher 2 - Assassins Of Kings seduced me like a brothel-trained geisha, the moment I left the game, I couldn't tell myself that it's "best game evaaaar". Indubitably, it's 2011's RPG of the year, but in the same time it fails in some elementary aspects, as if CD Projekt Red are some kind of geniuses with a few autistic or epileptic moments. I can't figure out how they managed to make this game slap Bioware in the face, storyline wise, while at the same time they screwed themselves up with infantile gameplay. I'll try to elaborate.

The Witcher 2 seems to promise a lot, and most of the time, it delivers. The games inspired by Andrzej Sapkowsky's books have become a pedestal in the modern RPG world. When Bethesda, Bioware and others started to play with the RPG formula, CD Projekt realised that they need to follow the same path. And they were wise to do it. The first Witcher was a decent game, with a slightly limping gameplay. The battle system was more boring than the fecundity of ants. Not to mention some crass sex scenes, badly implemented, game cards with naked ladies in the memory of the ones you banged, and sometimes the story was just lame. The main problem of the sequel is that it presumes everyone has played the first Witcher. Which is stupid. If you make mass-market appeal, you go for the Bioware-Mass Effect model, which is, you don't have to play the prequel at all, but instead what the player needs to know is delivered in a short, subtle way, along with the moral dilemmas integrated into the game's intro.

The most surprising part when meeting The Witcher 2 is the graphics. The technical and the artistic have made a communion in the face of the gods and rise to be, in my opinion, an oasis in the desert of Unreal Engine 3 clones. I haven't seen a single wishy-washy texture. I haven't seen any copy-pasted locations (*frowns at Dragon Age 2*), every bit of land, rock, piece of marble, twig, cheese, cabbage, foal, badger is in its place. Unfortunately, the attached screenshots do not do justice to the game at all. Trust me, it looks way better than what you see here. The problem is that you need a high-end PC to enjoy The Witcher 2 in all it's glory on ultra settings. The first Witcher used the Aurora Engine, the engine from Bioware, but what they've done now from scratch is evidence of their meticulous effort. Bravos.

Even if every blade of grass tickles your retina more than the sole of your foot, the gameplay has a few hiccups, that won't go away, regardless of the cough syrups and healing potions you throw down its throat. The combat is as pretty as it is inconsistent. At the beginning of the game, you'll get your ass kicked if you jump on more than three enemies at once, but from the end of the second act, after you're already full of steroids, all the fights feel like walks in the parks. If you choose the easy difficulty level at the beginning, the whole game becomes a bore fest when it comes to combat. The fluidity of the moves, on the other hand, seems to calm the nerves. No longer do we have to assist a "movie" in the middle of the battle, like in the first Witcher, because now we get actively involved. The combos, dodges, parries, spells, bombs, all in real time, like it would combine the third-person action game with God Of War. Why God Of War? Welcome back, quick-time events. Indeed, in the sweet classic style, at a big boss fight, we will see W, S, A, D making an exercise for "who is the quickest?".

An now, to wander off. This is not a review in the true meaning of the word, it doesn't have to be. I'd have many other things to say about The Witcher 2, but I will stop here. Why? Because it turned me off in a few ways, and I finished it only for the sake of finishing it. By Krishna's vagina, how can you take a serious, dark game, inspired by a top notch fantasy book, and fill it with replies and non-subtle texts that make references at things in our universe and not the book's. How in the name of Buddha's fat phallus can you have quests like "Mystic River" and "Fight Club"? And this is not all. The drop that filled the bowl was really lame. Here comes a witch at us (me and Iorveth, an elf ally, or enemy, depending on how you play and what decisions you take) and she begs us to gather some rare herbs for a potion and artefacts for a spell. A category of those artefacts is called "Rings of power", at which Iorveth and Geralt (me) start making jokes: "One ring to rule them all? And in the darkness bind them? Hah! Those are just fairy-tales witch!" FFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU. This is the point where I quit the game, made a four day break playing Far Cry 2, and came back after to finish it.

The TL;DR version

Is it worth the money? Yes, fully. It's this year's best RPG, by far. But I feel that The Witcher 2 enters into the typology of my ex-girlfriends. I love them and hate them at the same time. So, after I finish with them, I appreciate them, but not come back for three days, and those three days will be next year. And also like my ex-girlfriends, The Witcher 2 is superb visually, but it devours your video card and processor in a short time. It's a genius and stupid game at the same time, but CD Projekt Red learned a lot from the mistakes made in their first game. They listened carefully to the fans and they delivered a spectacular product. We hope they do the same thing for The Witcher 3.

4/5