finished it, comments from before apply. Fucked health system and tedious combat situations. Add shonky camera at quite a few points and a lack of intuitive gameplay in parts (the first one did this aspect much better) and its more frustratin than fun.

Nice environements though, despite repetitve visits to same areas. 

as part of my 'research' into this genre, i tried this game out.

i was just wondering if anyone else had tried it.

i didn't play long, about 6 missions maybe, but it was still pretty fun, but also annoying at times.

graphics are alright, and i liked the slowerpaced combat. not being able to move wherever i wanted to annoyed the hell out of me though. you can only move to other objects, which takes some of the tactical feel out of the game. it also reminded me of sword of the stars which could have been amazing (taking the original Stars! but with nicer graphics and a little simpler control) but ended up as shit because you couldn't do a lot of things that made Stars! amazing. 

Hooray! Spam is awesome. 

-_- 

Ok. 

Just played this. Obviously I'm not into realistic warfare bollox but this is pretty damn cool. Pretty frantic and very atmospheric, and looks very good without any slow-down issues.

Hmmm, tempted tempted.... 

http://haukerehfeld.de/misc/temp/cursor10.png

max score, 1 cursor left.

i suck though, http://youtube.com/watch?v=saN-LV379fI 

Just played through the demo, damn this is a great game! Very cinematic and atmospheric, and the over the shoulder camera is really great.

Combat is a bit too simple, to pull off combo attacks all you need to do is click the mouse at the correct time, this never really changes so combat can get a little repetitive quite quickly sadly.

I must say, the blood splatter you get on the ground when you slit someone's throat is by far the most realistic I have seen so far, yes maybe I do need some therapy :)

If you like action RPG's I would definitely check this one out! 

That's the encouragement one needs. 

And it kicks large quantities of ass, in my opinion. I'm getting toward the end of act 2 (out of 5), and I've put a lot of hours into it. They aren't lying when they promise 60-80 hours of gameplay.

Not allowing you to pick class/race like many RPGs allowed them to focus the story a lot more, and it's a good thing. There's a fair number of plot points and characters to keep track of, and still a decent degree of character customization possible as you progress.

Good stuff: Decisions that make more difference than usual in an RPG. Tons of side quests that you can do or not. Challenging enemies and gameplay (I'm playing on normal difficulty). A real feeling of depth and history to the world. Fun dialogue at times. Being told "Your mother sucks dwarf cock!" Getting laid. BOOBS!

Bad stuff: Somewhat fussy and unintuitive alchemy system, occasionally silly/repetitive dialogue trees and canned responses, sort of lame drinking game, minor bugs at times, drastically cut dialogue for English version.

One of the best games I've played in quite a while. I recommend it.

Also, check the first post in this thread on the Something Awful forums for additional information and some good addons/downloads for expanded English subtitles and a number of other things:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2718714 

Being told "Your mother sucks dwarf cock!" Getting laid. BOOBS!

Excellent. Sounds like the best real life has to offer :) 

The Witcher and he says he is enjoying it quite much. Thank God something has pried him away from World Of Warcraft, I thought I was going to have to kill him one day for his own good. 

Yeah...W.O.W.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/01/23

I'd probably be interested in playing MMORPGs if I didn't think that most other people suck. :)

That being said, I still might give Age of Conan a try when it comes out... 

Just tried the Witcher demo. Initial impressions: Combat and controls, WTF?

Given I've got Gothic3 and Guild Wars Nightfall to finish, and most of Dark Messiah to play, I'm not sure that this is adding anything to my fantasy fix...

P.S. Gears Of War PC - any good? How well does it run? Knowledge plz. 

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/2831-Zero-Punctuation-The-Witcher 

Seriously tho, I sounds like the combat in The Witcher is pants. I mean since when was it good to kill enemies by clicking on them once?

Ill stick to FPS :-D 

Just a repost of 1492, regarding the Witcher game. It's worth noting that I haven't bothered loading it up to play again since, which may be more telling than anything else.

From what I've seen so far, the Witcher is a very nice "interactive movie"... apart from, perhaps, the interactive bits. :D

To be fair I've only played for about 5-10 minutes. I actually clocked in 1-2 hours overall, but actual playtime was less than 10 minutes. The rest of the time I was watching cutscenes and loading bars.

I trust the game will open up a bit more soon, once the initial story setup has been done, allowing me to play a bit more and get a more informed opinion on the gameplay. So far though, the fun factor has been hampered by crappy camera controls and a fairly annoying combat system, so I can't say I've truly enjoyed my play time thus far.

The camera has a few different modes and can be adjusted automatically or manually... I preferred the manual setup, but instead of allowing full control and playing nice, the camera jumped around a lot in a really shitty and distracting way. It seems like they've tried to allow for both a point-and-click style movement/auto camera model, while also allowing the option for WASD control for movement with a manual camera. So rather than being perfect for one of those styles, it ends up being pretty average for both.

The combat so far is a bit... meh. Rather than simple button mashing or auto-attacks, The Witcher lies somewhere in between - clicking on a bad guy will initiate an attack sequence, and you're required to press the mouse button at the appropriate times to perform extra attacks (bad timing will fuck up the sequence and you'll have to start again). It works well enough, but I'm not sure if I really like it or not yet. You can also change stances and cast spells, though I don't have many options yet (for spells at least) so it's hard to say whether those additional skills will make it interesting enough or not.

Ultimately if the game overall is good enough, I can see myself putting up with the less-than-ideal camera and combat... but only if the rest of the game is above average. So far it looks pretty good - the story is interesting enough, art is nice, voice acting is pretty good, etc, no complaints really, other than the aforementioned camera and combat issues. 

Great fun, its a short game but really fun while it lasts. Chainsaw kills rock!

Runs surprisingly smoothly at max settings (I would say it runs a lot smoother than UT3 for example) and looks great.

Multiplayer uses Games for windows live which is utter shit though, a shame cos the online game was great fun on the xbox.

Worth looking at imo 

Had to download ATI drivers, hehe, it was just crashing the computer everytime I clicked the icon.

Thought it was good! It seems there arent very many graphics option in the beta demo. I tried it in 1024/768 and it wasnt too bad (by my standards) but I resorted to 640/480 in the end, cause gameplay get the better of me. I love the unreal tournament series DEMOS! Its great that you can just download, install and get straight onto a decent deathmatch game, it s000 easy!!

Hmmm, Gears of War, Bioshock and UT3 - Unreal engine looks pretty sweet nowadays huh!!?

I still think I'd prefer mapping for D3/Q4 when I get new computer tho!! 

UT3 has been worth the investment. The speedy gameplay and balance are the best of the series so far.

Warfare mode is a little awkward with a strange CTF element mixed into the Onslaught format. The vehicles are a mixed bag, and the hoverboard is simply idiotic.

But I'm in it for the straight DM game, and it's great. It is surprisingly smooth on low-end systems and very nice looking on good hardware. 

Thanks for the info, reckon I'll give that a look. 

Have you ever played GoW on the XBox360?

I would put it down as 'highly recommended', brilliant graphics balanced out with good gameplay, love the way that you can reload faster if you press you reload button twice with the correct timing, also love the combat system, the way it incorporates the environment as 'cover', where you can do blindfiring as well as ducking then shooting, love the squad stuff...
...well concieved and executed game!

A bit short, but some of the more memorable scenes make up for that threefold, good replayablity!! 

I'm D/Loading the Orange Box . . . my mapping will suffer as a result. 

I wish I could play through Portal again for the first time.