Recent reviews by Beastly

So, I bought this game years ago so I suppose I'm obligated to review it. I'll split this into a few sections: Gameplay (combat, signs, alchemy), story, and last will be graphics and tweaking the game (mods, reshades, etc).

Gameplay - A lot of people compare these style of games (y'know, RPG sword-wielding games) to Dark Souls in terms of combat, we've all heard the adage 'Oh well the combat's just like Dark Souls'. Combat is fluid and fun, there's not much of a learning curve (at least comparing to Dark Souls). In general the combat is straight-forward, what gets interesting are the signs. CDPR really took signs to a whole new level, and this is where the gameplay is great, signs are just a great dynamic in fights because now rationing your stamina becomes important, because no stamina means a shorter dodge which can potentially mean that your Geralt is about to get Bill Cosby'd.
Alchemy & Smithing: In Skyrim nobody really cared about alchemy or smithing (great game but that part of it was tedious and boring as hell). Not so in TW3, CDPR did alchemy right. It's straightforward and actually, enjoyable. Once you get new potions and bombs and start using them you feel like a badass. Smithing as well, getting witcher gear which is both aesthetically pleasing and more functional than what you can get from roaming, quests, or even from the inventory of shopkeepers. Overall it is very compelling to do smithing and alchemy.

Story - Main reason to play this game honestly. Just to get it out of the way: The DLCs are incredible. Hearts of Stone was similar to one of the story arcs in the beginning of the main game (the baron of velen), it was dark, captivating, and the villains are not who you initially are led to believe. Blood & Wine was a great send-off as well but Hearts of Stone is the second best DLC I've ever played, with The Citadel DLC from ME3 being the best, and HoS is the best DLC story-wise I've ever played.
Main story though, there are a lot of smaller story arcs as well that help with the grand story arc (Dijkstra's revolution - only one that had a meh ending for me, Baron of Velen, Triss and the mages, The Wolf of WallGarden in Skellige, etc) the story is dark, captivating, and overall awesome.

However, it's not all peachy. During any conversation in The Last of Us, it was all motion captured and Joel's movements were all fluid and surreal and it felt like a real interaction - TW3 however it's a lot of Geralt just standing around and maybe an occasional hand movement. Even the cinematics didn't have that much movement unless it was a fight scene... Or sex scene.

Modding - Vanilla graphics do look great, and I highly recommend first playthrough being done vanilla. The 'problem' with modding is that unlike TW2 (where CDPR released the 'RedKit' which were the official modding tools of TW2 - which is why TW2 has a lot of great mods) TW3 has no official modding kit. Thus modders had to get creative with their modding.
Comparing to Skyrim which has an incredible modding scene; Due to there being minimal modding support from CDPR the modding scene in TW3 is definitely lackluster. Doesn't mean it's necessarily bad though, lots of great mods out there and really simple and easy to install.

Overall this game gets a 9.5/10. Even though I harped on some things, the game is just... Excellent. Definitely a lot of work was put into this game and it shows.