First Impressions: The Witcher 2

So, I've only spent maybe an hour or so with the game thus far, and a few things stand out.

The game is definitely pretty, with all the modern bells and whistles (DoF, SSAO, Motion Blur, etc.).  And with all the settings maxed out, it kind of chugs on my poor, outdated system (Q9650, HD 5870) at 1920x1200.  However, all it took to get things running buttery smooth was lowering textures to merely "Large" and turning off "Ubersampling."  Yes, apparently that's a thing.

The big Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot is the fact that the only graphics settings adjustable in-game are brightness and gamma.  That's it.  For everything else, you have to exit the game, start the launcher, adjust the settings, then start the game again.  Not only that, but the same hoops have to be jumped through to remap the gorram keys. Also (brace for the online forum wrath) the game doesn't support anything but a 16:9 monitor natively.  Anything else is going to have black bars.  Double-yew-Tee-Eff. This is not okay, CDProjekt! It smacks of consoleportitis, which is really fracking bad on a game that's supposedly PC-exclusive.

And despite the overall prettiness, some things just look off.  Geralt, the titular character, runs with an awkward-looking gait, hands sort of flopping loosely in front, and the animation seems to loop too fast, as if it were a Charlie Chaplin movie.  Lip-synching is pretty bad, and the facial animations have a decidedly last-generation look.  What voice acting I saw is rather poor, too, and I noticed a lot of looping, where it really doesn't make sense; characters in the background endlessly repeating the same few lines of dialogue.  Time will tell whether this is true out side of the prologue.

And the combat, ugh.  Dealing with anything more than two characters seems punishingly difficult even on the normal difficulty setting, involving a horribly consoliffic amount of button-mashing as you endlessly roll around to avoid being surrounded.  This is compounded by a lack of chokepoints (doorways look promising in this regard, but an uninterruptible animation has you walking through and closing the door behind.  Worst of all, the block/parry button seems to randomly stop working about a third of the time.

Apparently, somewhere between Witcher 1 and 2, Geralt has completely forgotten that useful "Group" combat style that let you swing a sword in broad arcs to hit more than one target.  Now, he exhibits a confounding inability to swing either of his huge claymores in to hit anything except for a single target within a 30 degree arc in front of him.

Don't get me wrong--I want to like the game, and plan to spend a good deal more time with it yet before forming a final opinion.  But some of these design decisions are rather baffling.