To short-circuit the bad Monty Python paraphrase I had planned, amongst the great things about CDProjekt's The Witcher are the brilliant setting based on Sapkowski's novels; the depth, variety and novelty of the plot and quests; the wonderful variety of characters you meet around the game world and the interactions you have with them; the excellent graphics and music that terrifically convey a sense of presence in the world and the cinematics that help set the plot in motion; the exciting action-based combat that takes a bit to learn but is rewarding and satisfying once mastered; the tremendous role-playing opportunities present due to the deep skill system and character development possibilities; and finally the really great character of Geralt.

The problems with the game, and there are a couple, are centred on the seemingly incessant load times and issues with the translation of the dialogue from the original Polish. But let me cut right to the chase: this isn't a game that will be played and forgotten. Nor is it likely to end up like Oblivion or Halo as revered one day and ridiculed for all of its flaws the next. Nor like Bioshock is it likely to face a sea of backlash when enough time has passed for people to see the difference between the 'bestest EVAR' game in many reviews and the excellent game they actually played.

No, The Witcher is a game that will sell okay now, get decent reviews now and yet be the one on everyone's lips for 'top RPGs of all time' when they are discussing it five years from now. Pretty bold stuff, I know, and I'm going to get even bolder ... now that I have read a few reviews since completing the game, I feel that the common problem that reviewers for big sites have is not having enough time.

But let's get to the details and I'll start with the bad stuff first so I can then launch into unchecked frothing and adulation that you can tune out if you get bored. Very early in the game you will enter a house, after a load time of about thirty seconds, which has two rooms. You will find the one or two items in those sparsely decorated rooms and then exit back to the main game world, but after another load time of about sixty seconds. You will then come to another house, and another, and the process will repeat itself. You will then realize that a half hour has passed and you have spent ten minutes gaming and twenty minutes waiting to do something. You will undoubtedly be annoyed: I know I was. The good news is that the developers are working on a patch that will address this and will hopefully be available by the time you are reading this.

I suppose there are some other aggravating moments; everyone steeped in computer RPGs talks about the first boss battle, where you are forced into the battle right after a long cut scene without the game auto saving or you getting the ability to quick save. Given that this is the first time you face a really difficult opponent, you will enter the battle expecting to win and then you will likely die - only to have to go through the entire cut scene sequence again. Console gamers will likely not even flinch at that - it has been a staple bad design element for console RPGs for ages. But that doesn't stop it from being annoying. There are a couple of other times when the game seems to 'cheat' - like when you are supposed to be sneaking yet are ambushed and when you are surprised by enemies from impossible locations. These are very uncommon occurrences, but annoyances nonetheless.

Oh and a final item that some have complained about: you play Geralt of Rivia. You play a white-haired male Witcher who engages in a lot of melee combat. You do not play a elven archer named Eli or a beautiful young Paladin named Aribeth or a malevolent sorcerer named Irenicus. You cannot choose your appearance or gender and to some that is a deal-breaker. This is unfortunate; personally I will take whatever choices a game hands me, so long as there is choice once I start the game - so whether I am Atila from Kult: Heretic Kingdoms or the Nameless One from the Gothic series matters little, so long as the rest of the game delivers a worthwhile experience. The Witcher certainly delivers a rich and unique experience, so it is unfortunate that some will allow this detail to stand in the way of playing.

Now it is time to revel in the glory of The Witcher.

From the very start of the game, you will find it unbelievable to comprehend that this is the same game engine that powered the original Neverwinter Nights - The Witcher is simply gorgeous. Yes, that truly is Bioware's Aurora engine underneath the hood. Of course, they largely ripped out and retooled the rendering system along the way, but however you slice it, the game fits perfectly among the bold and beautiful releases of 2007. I'm sure you could pick apart certain specific elements and describe why The Witcher isn't 'next-gen enough', but none of that matters when you are playing the game, looking at the classic European buildings, watching the realistic characters moving through their daily lives. None of it matters when you observe background actions happening in a soft defocus that provides a clear contrast between foreground and background. Augmenting the graphics is a range of motion captured character animations and physics effects powered the Karma engine that really make the game 'pop' off the screen. Everything comes together to produce one of the most stunning looking games in recent memory. It is more than just pushing pixels, using shaders, dynamic lighting and particle effects; it is about the ability of the visual imagery to provide a context for the story, for the characters and buildings and blades of grass to become more than eye candy. That is one thing that The Witcher does extremely well: rather than just delivering eye candy, it provides a true setting that is alive and fully realized.

Aside from the minor translation issues I mentioned, I have nothing but praise for the audio portion of The Witcher. The soundtrack itself is excellent; the high fantasy themes are mixed with more modern music and personal themes that provide a moving background for the action and add to the cinematic feel of the game. As I mentioned before, I found the voice acting generally quite good; I honestly believe that if I didn't know the game was originally voiced in Polish then I wouldn't have noticed anything until much later on. Sure, there is some mediocre voice acting, but no more than many big budget games, and there are also plenty of games full of language issues and grammar problems. My point is that we look for these things - well, I know that I certainly look for them - because we know that the game is translated and the voice acting is 'second generation', so therefore we assume that there will be issues.

The controls are pretty standard for a third person action RPG - you control Geralt with standard WASD keys and mouse movement. There are context-specific indicators for talking or combat and others that appear under specific circumstances during battles. The camera is quite friendly as well; you can have an over-the-shoulder view, a close isometric view and a far isometric view. Each has its use; over-the-shoulder works best for getting into the action, the close isometric view is good for working on attacks in a narrow field of view and far isometric is best to survey and plan your actions over a much broader range of operations. How you use these camera modes really depends on how you want to play the game; some people will choose over-the-shoulder and never look back. I used all three, but preferred isometric for getting set for large-scale battles and then over-the-shoulder for all of the action.

I could drone on about the technical stuff more, but in a real RPG there are three things that really matter: the story, the story and the story. Okay, perhaps that is overstating it - the combat system and quest structure also matter. So do many other things; alchemy, skill progressions and character development, to name a few. But, the bottom line is this - what separates many of the best RPGs from ones that are just very good is the depth of the story and how you fit into it as it evolves throughout the game.

My quick take on the story of The Witcher is that it takes game writing to a level we haven't seen since Planescape: Torment. You will find the usual assortment of quests, side quests, twists and turns, and other elements that keep you engaged for the eighty or more hours it will take you to traverse this massive tale. Eighty hours: they still make games that long? They sure do - games with tons of characters, loads of interesting stuff going on, masses of dialogue and just generally some of the deepest game writing we've ever seen. It all starts with the fiction of Andrzej Sapkowski, the Polish author of the Witcher novels and stories, and he is behind the story here. The style of the game is quite eclectic; it makes a choice not to present the characters and dialog and overall style in a manner such as Two Worlds that immediately suggests a time and place in existing history. Instead, The Witcher at times suggests themes associated with the whole of the European literary tradition, from Eastern to Western, ancient to modern and serious to humorous. It is this juxtaposition of humorous moments - of seemingly nonsensical pairings of characters and names and speaking styles - with a very serious set of themes associated with a world at odds with itself, one which is spiraling towards ruin.

It is this depth of moral and emotional content that sets The Witcher apart. Fairly early on you come across a village and meet up with a leader who tells you that the monsters are not just random creatures, but embody some sort of human evil and that the problems spreading through the land are the coming to fruition of those evils across the land. This isn't some sort of prototypical 'Evil Kowakian Monkey Lizard gone bad' story; it is a story of an evil and darkness encroaching that is of our own accord. In all honesty, it is the fantasy realization of the horrors that humans bring upon themselves and each other on an all too regular basis.

But don't let that make you think that The Witcher is a tale whose solution comes through recycling and biking to work; it is more that the characters you see in the game are mainly people you could see while walking through any big city anywhere in the world on a Saturday afternoon. They have just been put in that position of having years of suffering, injustice and brutality put upon them - and they increasingly come to reflect their surroundings. This ambiguous morality, of good people doing horrible things for what they see as the greater good, is just an absolutely fantastic backdrop for an epic RPG, and The Witcher takes full advantage of that setting. In this world, the choices you make truly matter and the decisions you make are not of the typical Bioware "I'll help you no matter what / show me the cash and I'll think about it / I'll kill them, kill you, and take everyone's money" sort. In those games you can see the impact of your good and bad decisions stacking up over time, such as with the 'light/dark' Jedi meter in Knights of the Old Republic. In this game however you get to make loads of small choices - give or take, be nice or cruel, help someone at the cost of a greater goal or let them suffer knowing that you are doing it for the right reasons.

Mentioning 'morality' and 'mature content' in the context of The Witcher is sure to bring a single topic to people's mind: sex. Certainly you can play the game as some sort of late-night soft-porn fantasy, but that really misses the larger point. Well, it misses the larger set of possibilities, but if that is how you choose to play then there is nothing to deter you, with the possible exception of consequences later in the game. In many role-playing games, the 'romance quest' is about as romantic as picking through a half-pound bag of M&Ms looking for the green ones, but here again, The Witcher isn't about a 'victory condition for romance'. It is about the fact that you are already a hero with a history behind you and a star-like reputation; you can use this leverage that for 'a bit of tail', you can try to be good to as many people as possible, you can seek out your 'one true love' only to find that you then need to choose between making her happy and doing what you truly feel is right.

Moving away from all the above elements, let's get into the action part of The Witcher. The battle system is something that you will either immediately love or always struggle with, yet I don't consider that a bad thing or a mark against the game; it is simply something you need to get used to in order to succeed. It is actually fairly simple; you select your combat style and click on an enemy to attack. If you aren't blocked or interrupted then you will see your targeting icon change, which gives you the opportunity to chain up your attacks for even more damage. If you manage to sustain your focus for another attack then you can get in a killing blow that is bloody, gory and quite satisfying. The quicker style is designed to land attacks with greater accuracy, but lower damage. In contrast, the heavy style deals massive damage in exchange for speed and accuracy, while the group style is meant for when you are surrounded by... a group! Of course, the selection of your combat style is critical; if you attempt a power attack using the slow style against a horde of quick enemies then you will never land a single blow, while using fast attacks against a massive foe will get you nowhere just as fast.

Of course, the character development system takes you well beyond three attack types. As Geralt advances through the game, he gains skill points and learns new alchemy formulas that together allow him to progress successfully. Alchemy is accomplished in a fairly standard way, but the way it is integrated into the game is anything but standard. It is not just a matter of making simple recipes to augment your supply, nor of subtle differences from standard formulas - in The Witcher you can make potions that greatly augment your abilities, or improve your weapons, or even act as bombs to take out your enemies. However, as your experiment with new recipes you can end up poisoning yourself as you attempt to make yourself more powerful or give yourself night vision or something.

The quests within the game range from complex to mundane; there are plenty of 'FedEx' fetch and kill quests, along with much more meaningful endeavors that entangle you with the petty conflicts between various factions and allow you to get yourself into permanent trouble. There are plenty of other things to do within the game and things that add loads of replayability; there are three endings possible based on how you choose to play, but even within those major threads there are loads of little things that happen that make the game feel quite different, even if you tend to stick to the same archetype each time. For example, I tend to play 'lawful good' or 'light jedi' characters, therefore my playthroughs tended to follow that trend. But, depending on how I treated the various people and factions I met, depending on how I interpreted the moral questions I faced, there were definite changes to the overall feel of the game world I encountered.

While you know there is a 'spreadsheet game' going on behind the scenes, The Witcher does as good a job of hiding it as any game I have ever played. The relationships between Geralt and many of the characters he meets are complex and multidimensional, and the relationship of your decisions and the quests you take and how you complete them all seem to figure into how the game proceeds. All of these things combine to make you feel like you are part of a complex and living world that is truly dynamically adapting to changes in real time.

There is an old saying that basically goes "I have seen the future and it is 'x'". There have been some very popular RPGs released over the past few years that some point to as the future of the genre. I hope they are wrong and I hope this because I want more depth in my role-playing games and less glorified action games. So when I think of that saying, I hope that The Witcher represents the future; it has plenty of combat, a deep skill system, nicely integrated alchemy and most importantly one of the best and deepest stories and quests ever written into a video game, as well as looking gorgeous throughout. Now that is something to strive for.

Reviewed by Michael Anderson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).