User Reviews

Quick Review: My score 9.5 Presentation: The Presentation of The Witcher 2 is wonderful, featuring an evolving story based on your decisions, the game is best described as a perfect mixture of Dragon Age Origins and the Gothic series.

Game play: Geralt is Witcher and as the name applies he is equipped with an arsenal of magic attack abilities and 2 swords, a steel one for humanoids and a silver one for monsters. You play through a Prologue, 3 chapters and an epilogue each chapter besides the epilogue has their own map, each map plays as a new sandbox location. These places evolve base on your decisions and will grow as your character grows, combat is fast paced and can best be described as AAA version of the Gothic series with just a little bit of Assassin Creed thrown in. Tactics will also play a role in the game play as you can buy and craft armor, bombs, potions and traps, all which can play a decisive role in combat.

Story: You play as Geralt the White Wolf, part of an order of warriors know as Witcher's, Witchers are created through alchemy and magic and their sole purpose in life is to protect mankind from monsters. So when Geralt has to save a King from a assassin he was shocked to learn that the assassin was a Witcher also. Geralt must now go on a journey to clear his name and discover the reason behind the assassination attempt. His journey will be shaped by your decision's.

Graphics: The best looking RPG of 2011 period, if you are worried about the poor optimization that the Witcher 1 had do not fret, the Witcher 2 is completely optimized. I only have 1 5850 and can run the game on Ultra.

Overall: Witcher 2 will go down as possibly the best RPG of 2011 and in my personal opinion crushes all competition so far. Any RPG fan will be disappointed if they do not buy this game.

Thank you for reading and hopefully you have the same enjoyment that I had with the Witcher 2.

First of all, make no mistake, this is a very good game, just as The Witcher was. It is however NOT a role-playing game in the traditional sense, where you can take on the role of virtually anybody - you are playing as Geralt of Rivia, period meaning you cannot make free decisions - everything boils down to that you are Geralt of Rivia, a witcher. In other games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, you form your role within slightly wider borders - Mass Effect's Commander Shepard can be a black woman or Asian male if the player would like to, giving slightly better immersion than The Witcher.

Background: Since it is possible to import a save from The Witcher and play on from that, some dialog has been adapted to that, like if Adda lives or died for example. However, a lot of key elements and key characters are simply forgotten and plays no part here, which is a crying shame.

Story: The story in The Witcher 2 is a quite complicated political story, but brilliantly written and executed, and one that does not seem forced. It feels plausible simply put, and the side quests are very good as well even if there are the usual DHL missions (fetch this and deliver it there) but they are quite few. Most side quests are actually deep, meaningful and play a part in the overall scheme. That said, nothing is given freely and sometimes one is forced to simply wait until another mission has played out, which is odd and frustrating.

The mini-games: Part of the game are the mini-games - new is the arm wrestling, but the knuckle fights are still here as well as the dice poker, and these games are simply brilliant. Not only can you make money from them, they are missions in their own right.

The sex: Yes, there is sex in the game, much more explicit than in any other game I've seen, but still keeping a main stream movie style, and I have yet to see two that are alike. I think this is actually quite refreshing, and perhaps it will push gaming into the adult entertainment box instead of being seen, more and more wrong, as something for kids. The sex scenes are very tastefully done, and CD1 should take full credit for that. The potential sex partners are fewer than in The Witcher, but Geralt can still enjoy himself with a wide range of good-looking females.

Graphics: Top-notch. Even if some characters changed their look a lot (including Geralt himself) the entire gaming world paints a very nitty-gritty picture, where there is dirt, mud and every piece of leather shows signs of wear and tear. It is a beautiful world in its own way, and the scope is grand.

Sound and music: Also top-notch. Here I should mention the voice-acting, and this is where the games gets a jackpot. Not a single character is out of place, not a word uttered the wrong way. Someone took great care in directing the actors, who all put in a wonderful effort.

Playing: Here the game let me down. First off, I play with the arrow keys in all games where moving around matters, but it was not possible to keymap the arrows, until a found a solution on a forum and some tweaking of a ini-file. Bad CD1, very bad.

Next came the main feature of games of this type, combat. If you are about to play this game, invest in a good new mouse, because it is a click-click-click-game, and frankly, I hate that. Add to this the fact that sometimes Geralt won't respond to keystrokes, meaning he might be in very deep poo.

Then comes potions, which can NOT be used whenever you feel like it - Geralt has to be in so much safety that he can go into meditation mode for that, and that sucks even worse and can cost a lot in potions if they are used at the wrong time ('ok, this might be a bad place, better buff. Oh, it wasn't...'). It steals away from the gaming experience that Geralt can not walk into an ambush, buff on the fly and fight his way out of it - the usual way I used was simply walking into whatever was ahead, check the resistance and load a saved game for buffing.

But to conclude, despite the small flaws, this is a very good game which will make hours fly away. Highly recommended.

Got it during holiday offer on Gog.com for free in November 2014, And very happy to get it. I don't really play RPG games that much, doesn't really interest me much. But I liked playing Witcher 2, haven't played 1, probably won't. Now waiting for Witcher 3.

The game has good story, characters, visuals are really good. Choices given in the game are sometimes tough, but important. You will easily get 30+ Hrs in this game, in just 1 play-through.

Game really splits in two parts in chapter 2, depending upon your choice. Will be playing it again, to really explore the game. I read somewhere it has 16 different endings, depending upon your choices, haven't looked for them yet, but excited too.

Luscious graphics and compelling narrative are the strong points of this sword and sorcery RPG, sequel to the remarkable debut by Polish developer CDProjekt RED.

Characters like Roche, Foltest, Iorveth and Letho are sharply defined, the gameworld they inhabit suitably ferocious (although exposition is handled somewhat less gracefully this time around). Fixed protagonist Geralt is once again an unflappable fantasy version of the Man with No Name. Choice & consequence moments are sprinkled throughout the game, determining which secondary characters live or bite the dust, and also the path pursued by Geralt, with a common prologue and first act, two mutually exclusive second acts and a common last act with different possible outcomes.

While combat (action-oriented, with a difficulty spike early on) is an improvement over the first game, gameplay overall isn't: character customization feels streamlined, secondary quests less meaty, a few quick time events vastly annoying (see an obnoxious boss fight against a Kraken-like monster), no location as varied as the city of Vizima in the first Witcher. This sequel is a better action game, but a worse RPG.

Overall, a flawed but worthy effort, and the Witcher 3 looks interesting already.

As a stand-alone game 8/10; as a sequel 6,5/10

So, I'm giving this a six. It's not the worst game ever and it does a lot right, but, and this is what really brings it down for me, it does a lot wrong it did right in the first one. The first thing that stood out to me, was how hard it is to see stuff. Where goes the path? Can I walk here? I just killed a guy, where is his stuff? The map is the worst, it doesn't give any information, even the lines sometimes don't seem te add up with the surroundings. Names of buildings have dissapeared. so you can only know what they are by entering, because most of them really look like eachother. The default settings for the mouse are hellish, so I had to turn the sentivity all the way down. But still sometimes it's easy to get turned around. After playing for a few hours, my eyes were hurting. The first game did this so much better.

Controls - in the first game at least you could choose how you wanted to play. Witcher 2 doesn't seem te have this option - even though it's in the options menu. Learning the controls was the most annoying thing ever. You get thrown into an arena, where they tell you all you different moves. You want to practice a move? You can't. Because now it's time for the next move. In this way they expect you to learn 9 different moves, by doing them al once. And when the game starts it's the same. I got one coin, some guy wanted to armwrestle and he defeated me easily cause I didn't understand the instructions - the armwresteling by the way plays like playing a game that keeps lagging. Not a fun minigame, and I will probably skip that quest. - anyway, guy took my coin, and I couldn't try again. Later the king wants me to help him aim the balista, I use the crosshair, too high, again? Nope, you missed, now we'll just go to the next thing. The first game did this so much better by introducing moves and giving you a lot of time to get used to everything. Sometimes Geralt puts away his sword automatically, but sometime he doesn't which is fun because now, after fighting a bunch of monsters, you have to restart because the whole village now wants to kill you because you just wanted to talk with someone and Geralt didn't put his weapon away. Fun! The first game did this too. But it didn't hurt my eyes so much that I didn't see I was still hold my sword. Sound is super loud and the game somehow didn't allow me to use the volume control on my keyboard. Also, if you're on steam and you want the game to pick up from how you ended the first game, go find out how to do this first. I was dumb enough to think the games would do this automatically, but when I found out the continuation mistakes I was too far in. Really dissapointing. And then there are some crashes, sound crashed and first I thought it was my own installation quitting, after 10 very scared en frustrated minutes I found out it was the game. Also some hard crashes. The first game had these too though.

So what is better from the first game? Well it's more detailled. The lipsyncing is better. Better voice acting. Really vivid surroundings. Things you should expect from a game after a few years. But that's about it.

I played on an Xbox One S. I got the game in March 2019 after getting The Witcher 3 in 2017 and playing that game multiple times through 2019 (I still play it.) I played The Witcher 2 in March of 2019 before getting to Flotsam and quit. Then, on a whim, I started my second (first complete) game November 24th 2020 and played on Dark difficulty. It was awful. Finished the game on December 4th and got the Dark Achievement, one of 0.97% of Xbox One players to do so.

This game is probably only good to play on PC based on what I've heard versus those playing on PS4 and Xbox One (and based on my own experience.) The Steel/Silver Swords rarely did damage to any person, creature, or animal, even the most basic person/creature/animal. Even with the best swords and best enhancements: little to no damage; really only worked on Harpies and Insectoids. I had to use bombs and then the further in, bombs stopped doing damage. Then it was all magic, basically, in most of Chapter II and all of Chapter III. The only thing that killed Wraiths were Grapeshot Bombs. I found that hilarious. My Silver Sword did 0% damage to Wraiths. The dragon killed me a lot. Took me hours to figure out what worked and the timing of how and where to move. The actual fight took 45 minutes using Igni, which was the only thing that did damage. On soldiers I ended up using Axii a lot until the last part of Chapter III where Axii no longer worked on soldiers. Originally I planned on killing Letho but ended up just letting him go 'cause if my sword didn't work, bombs stopped working, and apparently magic was barely working anymore...what was the point in trying?

The main story and many of the side quests were perfectly fine as stories go but the rest just made me hate the game, overall. I read about other gamers playing on Normal on PS4 and Xbox that had similar problems; so really they all should have just played on Dark to get the Achievement because it seems it was Dark on all difficulty levels for us. Death March (with everything one can turn off turned off, which is how I played it) was easy on The Witcher 3 compared to Dark for The Witcher 2. I had fun with that game. If I didn't have the digital version of The Witcher 2, I probably would have broke it to pieces. It was unnecessarily difficult.