The finale to Geralt of Rivia (and Ciri’s)’s story comes to a close with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. After nearly a year of push backs and delays, the game finally reached final product last month. I decided on waiting for a few bug fixes before going all in with the game to the end, which made the experience very worth while

The Witcher 3: Wild hunt is a 2015 action RPG, it is developed and published by CD Projeckt Red. It is available on PC, Playstation 4, and Xbox One.

Having played The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings on Xbox 360, I was able to get a little taste of Geralt of Rivia’s world without the need of a good gaming PC. The controls worked surprisingly well for a game that started off as a PC exclusive, one of my main gripes with the game was it’s annoying map & tracking system, which would often bounce you back and forth between your destination and the middle of nowhere. While those issues still exists in The Witcher 3; Wild Hunt, they weren’t nearly as annoying.

Boss battles could be fun and others annoying.

THE GOOD: The Witcher 3’s combat system returns with a more balanced feel than in the previous title, with a heavy focus on foot work more than actual attack power, you would have to time between dodging and attacking, instead of just unleashing a barrage of sword swings, that could likely end up killing you rather than the enemy. The magical signs make a comeback, and were a lot more simple to use in The Witcher 3, I recalled them being quite difficult to pull off in battle in The Witcher 2, but here it was just the simple click of a button to pull up the sign wheel, select your preferred sign, and actually use the sign. The leveling system was also fairly simple, with a small amount of exp points needed to level up Geralt with every upcoming level, and players gaining attribute points through a level upgrade to make Geralt even more powerful than ever. The use of other secondary weapons such as bombs and the crossbow also became helpful live savers as you tried to plow your way through waves of enemies or an extremely tough boss. Another notable plus was the beautiful OST composed by Marcin Przybyłowicz, Mikolai Stroinski, and Percival. They did an excellent job shaping the open world and story through music. Gwent was also a fun mini game to take time off of quest and travel grinds, however it was somewhat difficult to get the hang of.

Roach was one of the most frustrating AIs to deal with.

THE BAD: While The Witcher 3 is a good game, bugs were clearly present, even when I decided on giving the game my full attention post-patch. For one thing Roach, your “trusty stead” had some of the most ignorant AI within the entire game. He would at times be frustrating to control, and sometimes the call button wouldn’t work, not to mention that when it did there would be times where Roach would simply appear and ignore you, leaving you to walk towards him or move forward and try calling him again. Other glitches included controls going out of whack, in one of the finale missions to the game, where the Wild Hunt attacks Geralt and crew, my Geralt would randomly jump and roll for no reason, multiple times the instance occurred more than once during the same quest.

The griffin cometh.

OVERALL THOUGHTS: While very present with bugs and issues, including game crashes here and there, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is still amazingly one of the best video game experiences of 2015 thus far. The open-world, OST, and improved combat and magic gives new and returning players something to look forward to, and the addition of Gwent is an welcome time killer when you don’t want to deal with the quest and travel grind. Roach had some rather annoying AI, and it’s even more frustrating realizing some players will be dependent on him for travel. There were also heavy control glitches during the latter main quests that was basically instant death. However, all in all the final product still manages to come out on top in overall enjoyment.