The Witcher (PC)

In addition to his sword styles, Geralt can also master hand to hand, useful in the Fist Fight mini-game and certain events. It's also possible to manually dodge, just double-tap a direction and Geralt will attempt to move, roll, spin out of harms way in combat. If you double-tap towards a foe there's a chance our hero will use a flip to jump over them and leave them vulnerable to a back attack.

Combat is not all about just clicking on your foe to attack either, there are numerous talents to buy to extend Geralt's combinations and provide bonuses to his weapons. You must learn to time your attacks with a careful left mouse button press, watching visual and listening for audio clues as you learn the combat system. A well timed attack leads to a more brutal assault and eventually Geralt becomes a whirling-dervish of steel-swinging death as his foes fall.

That's not all, there are also finishing moves (that become more flamboyant) as you begin to unlock the secrets of combat in the Witcher. Knockdown or stun an enemy you can unleash a devastating finisher that can seriously wound or in most cases outright slay an opponent. I used one of the Witcher's art signs to stun a thug's boss and then Geralt neatly lopped his head off with one blow for example.

The combat system is great, it's fluid and after a short learning curve it really begins to shine as you enhance Geralt with talent points acquired from levelling up and other means. The talent trees in the game with over 250 or so skills to master are some of the most thoughtful skill selections I've seen in a RPG to date and they make you choose between some of them, because you can only get about 60% of the skills in one playthrough, so it's worth working out what kind of Witcher you want to hone.

Geralt has several attributes to enhance, but rather than just adding +1 per point to a static value, you're picking talents that hone those values even more. For example you might want to up his strength to allow a wide range of damage and endurance increases, compared to just adding a talent in the strong style to give you more damage that way.

There are also vital intelligence based talents, dexterity ones too. There are talents that allow you to extract more ingredients from monsters or just learn about those creatures you face by slaying them. So that you can be better prepared the next time a random encounter pops out a bunch of Barghest for example.

Whilst I'm on the subject of talents, you gain experience from doing things, killing monsters, finishing quests. When you level up you have to mediate (like sleeping in Oblivion) then you can distribute your talents and depending on what you've chosen you'll rest for an hour or even more.

You can only rest in certain conversation dialogues (usually with an inn-keeper) or at a camp fire (at first you'll need a flint to light them, but later on, Igni - the fire art sign allows you to do that yourself). It's worth noting that you can also perform alchemy at a camp fire and adjust your Witcher medallion to detect monsters or magic.

The alchemy system has shades of Oblivion and Two Worlds, you can mix various ingredients based on formulae you acquire during the game or even attempt to experiment yourself. Thankfully the game has a save anywhere (except in combat) option and the quick-load and quick-save function is going to see some use on the harder difficulty levels.