The already great PC RPG The Witcher has been enhanced.In spite of coming from the minor Polish developer CD Project, The Witcher went and became one of last year’s most successful role-playing games, and for good reason. It’s not exactly a “Zelda” game of collecting hearts and smashing cutesy enemies – The Witcher is about greed, malice, violence and bloodshed.

As the player character Geralt, you wake up in a castle with no recollection of how you got there. You’ve been patched up and taken care of by friends, but soon enough all hell breaks loose and you’re forced to defend the castle from a gang of magic-using thieves. That’s the tutorial and introduction to The Witcher, and after that the real adventure starts. While The Witcher isn’t a medieval GTA, it’s about as close as it gets. There’s a lot of violence and adult themes, so it’s not overly suitable for the young ones.

The Enhanced edition of The Witcher is not a bug fix by definition, but it deals with a few issues that players were experiencing, such as long load times and some less-than-superior voiceovers. The original Polish version actually had much more dialogue than the English version, which stole away some of the plot from  those of us whose Polish isn’t the best. The game has also been endowed with brand new animations that look and feel better than the original ones.

In all, there are quite a few enhancements that makes it deserving of the new title. For those who already own the game, there’s no reason to go out and buy it again unless you’re a huge The Witcher fan; you can get all the new in-game content for free by downloading the official patches. What you don’t get, however, is a couple of bonus discs with the game’s sound track and comments from the developers. Plus a more interesting add-on of two new missions, although those are quite short and not enough to warrant another purchase.

Nevertheless, The Witcher Enhanced Edition should be more than enough to persuade those who haven’t already grabbed a copy to do so now. Get it at GameStop.

Tags | The Witcher