The melee combat is pretty tedious, but I'm starting to develop magic a bit to mix things up. Also on the melee, sometimes the system seems non responsive? Occasionally Geralt simply refuses to swing when commanded, usually in the Strong style.
The combat could be better, but it's actually kinda fun if you explore it a bit. Suggestions:
1. Play at Hard. At lower levels, you're just staring at the stupid flaming-sword icon and clicking away like a monkey. (Hard isn't all that hard anyway.)
2. Use alchemy a lot -- potions, oils, even bombs.
3. Use signs a lot -- Aard and Igni are especially nice. Aard + finishing move ends lots of fights quickly.
4. Practice switching styles on the fly. Especially once you've built up your character a bit, you'll start causing special effects like pain, blinding, or bleeding: when that happens, it's time to switch to Strong mode and finish 'em off.
5. Practice combat acrobatics. You can vault over opponents to get into better position.
The real problem with the combat is that you don't actually *need* to do any of this -- the fights are all winnable just by picking the right style and clicking away. They're just a lot more fun (not to mention over more quickly) if you do learn to fight in more diverse ways.
One big issue is that the dreaded "cut scenes" can trigger during combat. It has happened to me at least 3 times. How dumb is that? Couldnt they simply do a hostile entity check before throwing the player into a ridiculous cutscene???
Agree. Fortunately, it's not all *that* frequent, and gets less frequent deeper into the game.
Finally, the escort quests really stink. You can't tell the NPC to hold back and they just love to launch themselves into melee to "help out" and get themselves killed. Seriously it is like moths to a bug zapper.
Agree. Fortunately there aren't all that many escort quests -- and in some of the later ones, the escortee actually has the sense to run and hide at the first sign of trouble.
The one thing that is a huge hit for me with this game is the setting. The dreary, cloudy, slimy and in some cases disgusting gutter feel of the environment. They really nailed it. Amazing art design really. Secondly the story is strong. Too bad they resort to so much linearity to tell the story. I'm not so sure I'm happy about "cinematic" gameplay. I hope Dragon Age isnt like this.
Yup. That only gets better as the game goes on, though, and there are some real branches in the story too. But it definitely is a fairly tightly structured game rather than a free-roamer à la Fallout.