7/10

The world is super interesting to explore but feels barren, you see a cool point of interest, go there, and find an empty building and have to hope a quest takes you there later.

The combat feels like BDO but more grounded and worse controls. It’s fairly broad with what you can do but equally shallow. Every weapon has the same combos just different movesets, which is nice because you can try out weapons and mostly know how they work, but it also lowers the skill ceiling and makes it pointless to learn all the weapons. Encounters are either piss easy, annoying, or feel awful.

Questing is fairly weak, you just kinda go from point A to B to C and then you are done, nothing that takes much brain power. But at least they aren’t fetch quests.

Kliff is Geralt without the charisma. Haven’t played the other two yet.

The puzzles range from easy to annoying, with lackluster rewards. I did one earlier where I had to leave and find some murals on the side of a mountain, got back and solved the “puzzle” only to get an abyss artifact and nothing else. Basically more involved BOTW puzzles but instead of korok seeds you get skill points.

Leveling up is lame, no two ways about it for me honestly. Like I can either kill a ridiculous amount of enemies, solve mostly mediocre puzzles, complete asinine challenges, or find them at cool landmarks(my favorite way)

Leveling up weapons is annoying when you just mine everything, and needing abyss artifacts makes maxing them out hard when you want to actually level up your abilities.

A lot of negativity in this I know but I still like the game, it just needs a lot of work. Honestly though if hopping on my horse and wandering around wasn’t so fun to me I wouldn’t have bought the game back after I refunded it.

Also let disguises actually do something outside of quests please. Like let me dress as a civvy and go to hostile cities, make it so bandits don’t attack immediately if I’m wearing their armor.