Agradezco que le hayan puesto el radar de gemas, que en la saga original el 1 era el único que no lo tenía. Pero man, ¿por qué la UI la cambiaron tanto? es que unreal engine no soporta textos u objetos 3D como interfaz?

De paso, me sucede lo mismo que los remakes de crash, le cambiaron las fisicas a tal punto que algunos niveles son más dificiles o más fáciles que antes. Esto podrían haberlo arreglado si le añadian el minisalto al planear de sus secuelas pero... nope, no lo pusieron. Tampoco añadieron el transfondo que había en el manual original, que de hecho era importante para que Gnasty Gnorc fuese minimamente interesante como jefe.

Action RPGs these days are real iffy due to the fact that they tend to feel too formulaic. They usually have good stories, but the graphics are horrible, the combat is clumsy, and the quest system is yawn-worthy. The Witcher 2 takes what was great from the first and makes it even better to form one of the greatest action RPGs of this generation.

You play, once again, as Geralt of Rivia, a Witcher, who got framed for assassinating King Demavend and must prove his innocence. The story is heavy in politics, but is also very deep and feels just like the novels. Triss Merrigold also returns with her beautiful red hair and all. You will also see other familiar faces such as Zoltan Chivay and Dandelion. The new faces are strong, likable, and memorable characters that you will grow to love or hate respectively throughout the course of this 20-30 hour game. Geralt himself is even stronger this time around with more problems than you can shake a stick at. You learn to respect him more and see just how much this poor man can take. CD Projekt really shows you the roots of both good and evil in humanity in such a realistic fashion, and that’s what really drives the characters home.


The combat in The Witcher 2 is better than the first game because gone are the timed sword swings and stances. You now just have light and heavy attacks, but can block, counter-attack (when you unlock the skill), and you still use the steel/silver sword combo. Steel is for people and silver is for monsters. The combat was very hard to do when the game first launched, but patches as of late have fixed this for multiple blocking, and faster response. The combat isn’t great and is clumsy especially early on when you aren’t very strong and towards the end of the game. Combat will make you smash your monitor in frustration in the beginning because you have to learn to just hit once or twice, dodge, run around, hit another couple of times, rinse and repeat 50 times. Yeah, it’s one of those games in the beginning. After you level up enough you can cut down enemies in just a couple of swings and groups of 7-10 won’t really bother you.

Of course you can equip better armor, weapons, and so forth, but The Witcher lets you do other things like equipping trophies that are found on bosses that increase stats, use sword enhancements such as oils, whetstones, runes, and armor enhancements (kind of like Monster Hunter?) This adds a lot of depth to the customization to your loadout which has endless possibilities. I think the biggest improvement is the resource gathering and alchemy because it’s so simple and easy now. Just gather resources as you go and you can meditate and create potions that increase your vigor (for signs; more on that later), vitality (health), a potion that lets you see in the dark, damage increasing potions etc. The only problem is you can’t drink them from the menu, but you have to use them before a fight. This is my biggest beef with the game because if you are low on health in a fight you’re screwed unless you took a Swallow potion beforehand. The premeditated potion drinking is a big flaw in the game, I think, but some hardcore RPG players may like this.


The Witcher is also famous for its Signs use because Witchers can’t use magic like sorcerers or mages can. There are six different signs and they use chunks of vigor but recharge over time. These Signs are vital to winning in combat especially against bosses, so learn to use these in tandem with sword combos and you can win even the toughest fights. One last thing you can use in combat are Places of Power which you find with your wolf medallion. Activate it and you may find, out in woods or wild places, signs of power that give you temporary stat boosts. These come in handy early in the game (especially in Flotsam) when you are at a low level.


The story also has moral decisions thrown in there that really change the outcome of the story. Of course, there are multiple playthroughs (but no new game+ sadly) so you can see what each decision will bring. There are a lot of plot holes in the story that aren’t filled until the very end during dialog which I found odd, so if you get confused just hang in there until the final moments of the game. Overall my biggest issue is the potion use, combat, and the huge difficulty spikes. The graphics are groundbreaking with gorgeous lighting, highly detailed textures, and amazing landscapes, as well as varied environments with nice weather effects. The character models look superb, and the voice acting is top notch. This game just shows that indie developers can make games look great. You do need a monster rig to run the game on high settings (especially with Ubersampling enabled you to need probably dual GPUs and a high-end quad-core CPU). Other than that The Witcher 2 is amazing in every way and should not be missed by anyone.

What happened Croteam? What the hell is this? Serious Sam 4 had the fate of following up Serious Sam 3 to rectify the issues that game had, which they succeeded in some regard. But they've introduced so many other problems with this game that I just barely enjoyed it more than SS3, which isn't exactly a high standard to surpass.
Let's start with the good, the gunplay is still really good, probably the most refined it has been since SS2, as it strips away most of the annoyances in SS3. The shotgun doesn't need to be reloaded anymore and the Assault Rifle holds more ammo per clip, even if aiming down iron sights and reloading it in the first place is the least Serious Sam thing ever. The Grenade Launcher returns and weapons like the Lasergun and Sniper Rifle are no longer kept as secrets and you actually get ammo for them. All guns feel weighty and great to use thanks to the great gore effects, with some of them having really good alt-fires which changes up the gameplay from being the same as the previous games. The enemy line-up is also a lot better. All those hitscanning soldiers from SS3 are gone, Arachnoids are used a lot less, Witch-Brides are no longer the most annoying enemy ever, the helicopters are no longer hitscanners and can be damaged with any weapon, and Khnum's can be damaged with any weapon.

The environments are also a lot more varied compared to the same ruined city/desert levels you saw in SS3. You battle through Italy, France and Russia and while it isn't as visually unique as SS2's levels, it's better than seeing the desert once again.

The new skill point system is a good inclusion even if the dual-wielding side of the tree is the far superior option. Speaking of dual-wielding, this is the first mainline SS game where you can dual wield weapons (excluding the 2.90 update to SS2) and it feels great and powerful even if the accuracy for weapons like the AR and minigun controls worse than a CSGO Negev at full throttle.

That's where the good ends, because Croteam have royally fucked up two major aspects of this game which made the game a slog to get through at times.

Firstly, the writing of this game is just so damn awful. Many say that it's just as bad as Borderlands 3, but I haven't played the game to be the judge of that but be prepared to hear terrible jokes and puns over and over again. Some fights have characters repeating puns back to back and it's just so garbage to listen to you'd wish friendly fire was on to get them to shut up.

And the worst of it all is the performance, technical problems and optimization of the engine. This has to be one of the most unoptimized games I have ever played. The frame rate is as stable as a 90 year old running downhill regardless of graphical settings and the textures always arrive late to the action. This game has been out for 2 years and Croteam have barely addressed this through patches. Sorry Croteam, pinning a thread in the Steam forums on how to run this game on a potato PC is not a real solution. Fix your Serious Engine or retire it, because at this rate nobody will be able to run Serious Sam 5 if it ever happens. In some aspects, this game looks worse than SS3 and that game came out in 2011. It's unacceptable that the game performs this bad and doesn't look anything ground-breaking to begin with.

I hope the new upcoming Painkiller game turns out to be really good because Serious Sam hasn't been good in a while (haven't played Siberian Mayhem yet but I hear good things about it) and if the series continues to go down this road, horde shooters will probably be a dead FPS sub-genre. If the technical problems and bad writing don't bother you, I can still recommend this, but they occur so frequently that they are hard to ignore.

Serious Sam deserves so much better than this.