Without a doubt the most boring trite I have ever played in my life. On a technical level it's a good game, it runs well, it's pretty and there is clearly a lot of love put into the game. However, the game itself is absolutely mind-numbing.

The gameplay is very similar to the 'Batman: Arkham' games with combos and gadgets, but unlike the Arkham games the Witcher 3's combat is not only easy and hilariously abusable - its also boring. The game gives you the tools to make combat irrelevant in the form of signs, oils and decoctions: Igni does a ludicrous amount of damage, Quen makes you functionally invincible if you have a brain, decoctions buff you to absurd degrees and oils skyrocket your damage even further. Raising the difficulty makes no appreciable difference, enemies simply have more health and damage which just forces you to rely more on the trivialising signs and oils. Bosses are similarly meaningless; just bigger enemies to annihilate with said tools. The only time the game is difficult is when enemies swarm you and lunge at you from off-screen to one-shot you but it doesn't matter because I have quen and I'm ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ invincible.

"Just don't use signs or oils if they make the game so easy," I hear you say from your highchair. Let's just ignore that doing so removes half the game and go with it, and well now suddenly you just added 50 extra hours to the gameplay because enemies now have one million health. If you have even the slightest amount of skill in any video game with a functioning combat system you wont need oils and are probably saving time by not wandering around for hours picking up plants. None of this would be a problem if it wasn't all so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boring, the combat can be easy if its fun but it isn't. It's clunky, it's slow. It is boring.


Maybe the puzzles are really good? Sadly, there are no puzzles in Witcher 3. Despite what you may think, walking into a room and turning on detective-vision Witcher-sense and hunting for pixels is not a puzzle, you are not solving anything by following a bread crumb trail, you are not solving anything by listening to Geralt tell you what to do and you are not solving anything by hunting glowing pixels until you are to allowed to leave. "Puzzles" in Witcher are time-wasters to make people think that they are actually solving ♥♥♥♥ when really you're just walking around in circles, listening to boring dialogue and clicking on glowing buttons like a conditioned ape. Now that I think about it... puzzles in Witcher are very similar to the puzzles in Dora the Explorer.


Well it is a story based game, so surely the story is good. To be honest I never finished the story, I had better things to do with my time run than between 50 npcs to have boring conversations about the lives of paper-thin, predictable carcitures. As to how far i got in the story itself, I stopped playing a few hours after the 'Bloody Baron' questline. Lets go over the 'Bloody Baron' questline. (Spoiler warning) It is a story that covers the tragedy of a poor baron who beats his wife and child to within an inch of their lives and now feels sad that they left him :'(. Your role in this is that he knows your estranged god-like super-soldier adopted daughter that you, for whatever reason, are worried about and he has knowledge of her whereabouts so now are forced to do several hours of soul crushingly boring I-Spy puzzles and meaningless dialogue with a wife beater you're a supposed to feel sorry for. People often point to this part of the game as being an excellent story with great characters which may be true if you have never engaged in any media beyond spongebob. However this is supposed to be an adult story for adult brains which is funny considering the gameplay until this point treats you as if you are 6 years old. It's kinda concerning, especially when you consider that most of the target audience for this game aren't going to be able to pick up on any of the themes it almost conveys or take it in the completely wrong direction since gamers arent known for their respect for women. Thankfully the quest ends and you are given your precious information about how your princess is in another castle which from what i am told is basically how the rest of the game goes. I was not able to get much deeper information about the rest of the story as anyone else I know fails to remember anything beyond brief moments and/or the dreams they had falling asleep while playing. If you're crying from your crib while reading my review, answer this; do YOU remember the story?


What it all really comes down to is that Witcher 3 is a babys-first RPG masquerading as something more. Its combat is clunky, unfun and abusable, its story is shallow and predictable, the RPG elements are limited to being Geralt and worst of all, in a medium with one major goal, The Witcher 3 is boring. Despite all that I have said, I understand that enjoyment is subjective and you're allowed to enjoy The Witcher 3. Jesus, it can even be your favourite game for all I care. However, quality is objective and Witcher 3 is objectively a bad game and the people who treat it like some incredible masterpiece that changed the landscape of video games are just wrong. When Dark Souls came out it was so beloved that it inspired an entire genre known as 'Souls-likes' some of which went on to great success such as: Star-Wars Fallen Order and Nioh. Even other nerd games like Hollow Knight are heavily inspired by Dark Souls. I struggle to find refrences or any game made in The Witchers image, 6 years since this game came out, and yet no one bothers to make a copycat game or anything like it. Let me repeat - it is not because the game is too perfect to imitate, but because anyone with understanding of video games knows that not only is it a ♥♥♥♥ game and isn't worth replicating, but no game developer wants to be in crunch time for two years to make endless mediocre quests with the same writing level as Skyrim.


If you're looking for an RPG experience that isnt a complete waste of time I suggest the following:

Misc: Horizon Zero Dawn, Red Dead Redemption 2, Final Fantasy 7 (I hear the remake is good), Vampyre the masquerade bloodlines (combat is crap but the story is vast), Bioshock 1 (not much of RPG but one of the best stories in video gaming), Undertale (despite the memes it is legitimately a good game with a lot of heart)

Sci-fi: Fallout New Vegas, Mass Effect 1-3, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, the original Deus Ex (2000) is a legitimate masterpiece but it's like 20 years old and I wouldn't recommend it unless you are prepared for something so outdated

Fantasy: Dragon Age, Skyrim (much like Witcher it's an extremely entry level RPG but even though it's ♥♥♥♥ it's at least fun), Monster Hunter World (stories on the low end but combat-wise it's a lot of fun) DARK SOULS 1-3 (I am biased in this as it is my favourite game but it does something Witcher 3 never does... let go of your hand)