So far, so good, eh? Well here's the bad news - this game is as unpolished as my only surviving pair of formal shoes. First off, it throws load screens in your face at every given opportunity. Whether you're entering a huge city or a tiny hut in the middle of nowhere, it's loadscreen time! The game takes around 30 hours or so to complete, and a good deal of that time is spent staring at load screens. Fine, they're very pretty concept art sketches of the place you're entering and they change depending on what time of day you arrive, but they're still just thumb twiddling pauses in gameplay. There are also a few really drawn out encounters – for example, if you want to ask the boatman to ferry you across the river, you have to confirm your request something like 4 times before he takes you seriously. Come on, for a scary-looking guy with a scar across his face and three bigass swords strapped to his body, I think once ought to be enough. Patches are supposed to alleviate the grievances caused by these hiccups (reduced load time and fixed conversation tree, respectively), but out of the box, it's quite a hassle.

Then there's also the character's general movement, which is a bit of a pain too. Despite all his physical prowess, Geralt is incapable of jumping unless it's in the middle of a combo. So there could be frustrating times when you find you can't clear a log that comes halfway up your shin at best. After playing a game like Assassin's Creed, where you can hurdle, run across or scale practically every structure in sight, moving around in The Witcher feels like you've got lead weights strapped to your ankles. This becomes especially cumbersome in some levels like the Swamp, where the messy sprawling organic nature of the layout is apt to fuck you up before you start memorising the shortest ways to get from one point to another. Another thing is that Geralt doesn't move fastest when streamlined. He moves fastest when he has his silver sword unsheathed in Fast style. No, that's not a euphemism for anything. It's just that whenever you want to cover long distances speedily, you don't just put your head down and charge; instead, you take out a sword and start speeding off in this uncomfortable-looking half-crouching pose. You have to understand, it looks just a little stupid.

Also, inventory management is way more painful than it needs to be, and before you know it, you'll be hoarding piles of trinkets and ingredients, most of which you're not sure whether you need or not. These guys could have just taken a few lessons from Titan Quest, or even Diablo II for that matter. All these things add up to piss on an otherwise unmarred floor. Means that, at the end of the day, there's a damn good game there somewhere for those who like their stories nice and detailed, if you're willing to wade through the shitty issues. Oh, and any takers, patch this bitch right after installation. I'm out.

Developer: CD Projekt

Publisher: Atari/CD Projekt

Year of release: 2007

Platform: PC