Recent reviews by Captain Bloodloss

What strikes me the most about this game is that it sort of rewards just exploring. The amount of times I've found a random item, only to start a side-quest later on where the NPC needs said item and Geralt just says, "Oh you mean THIS doohicky? Yeah already got it" is crazy in-depth.

I've also found random letters that include mentions to minor quest outcomes that I've previously done and thought how insane it is that CDProjekt thought of that.

The gameplay loops are really fun and you can decide how you want to play each session. Fancy just destroying some merchants at Gwent? That'll fill a few hours before you'll want to go do some contracts.

Overall, if you're a fan of open-world games, then just get this one. Easily the best I've played.

This is a very promising game with a decent amount of content already! I've spent about 6 hours completing what there currently is, according to Steam's stats. At the end there's a few levels splitting off which shows there's going to be at least double the content currently in the game. I'd expect there to be even more than that since there seems to be a story in there that's barely begun.

Overall for an early-access game it's already well polished. There's a few things I'd improve, so I'll list the good and the bad below:

Good:
1) Funny characters and writing
2) The general gameplay loop is pretty fun and introduces enough unique stuff to keep you on your toes and moving towards a clear goal.
3) Nice retro graphics. Kind of reminds me of Darwinia. Similar-ish gameplay style to that game as well.
4) challenging, but actually dying seems to be difficult to achieve so even players new to the genre shouldn't have trouble getting into it.


Needs improvement:
1) As it's early access, there are some bugs. I will be notifying the developers with as much information as I can to get them sorted. They range in the current version from Hexter AI failing when restarting a mission (I got myself into an un-progressable state at the very beginning of a level so had to restart) to one crash in 6 hours which was probably due to alt-tabbing too many times
2) My laptop, though 3 years old, had pretty poor performance on this game. Don't let the simplistic graphics fool you, there are some pretty resource-intensive effects, particularly the firewall in a later level which took my FPS from 60 to 20 while looking at it. I was running on Low effects at the time. This brings me to:
3) Graphics options are almost non-existant. If you want cutomisability, you won't find it here, just a toggle from Low to High and some resolution options.
4) There are no rebindable keys. There also wasn't much help in-game on basic functionality like zooming in and out using the keyboard (I'm on a laptop with a trackpad, so the scroll-wheel didn't work for me).
5) Hexters can be very stupid. Mostly they work out themselves what they need to be doing at any given moment, but there are times, especially towards the end of the last level when I was trying to build my bit bridge that the Hexters just refused to take the resources from the storage/stockpile to the Bit Bridge manufacturing plant. I had to cajole them by loading them up onto the car then transporting them to the area and kicking them out manually. They would do a bit of work, but when they got tired they'd go back to the main base and I'd have to do it all over again. That final factory probably needs its own dedicated haulers. It's a minor issue, but if you're not careful you could be sitting there on 3x speed for a while waiting for something to finish that simply won't unless you force them to.



So overall I'd highly recommend this game, especially since it looks like there's a lot more content on the way. The bugs are already pretty minor and will no doubt be fixed with patches, so I look forward to finishing it in due course!