The Witcher 2 :Assassins of Kings ENHANCED EDITION Review

Hey everyone this is Khalid here, and I’m going to be most probably posting games reviews and such. This my first post here and I hope you guys would like or find at the very least beneficial to see whether you’re really want to buy the game or go ahead and pass. This review is going to be concerned with The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings (Enhanced Edition) which was released exclusively to the Xbox 360.

First let's take a quick trip back in time to the year 2007 when the first Witcher game was released, the game was viewed by the gaming community as huge leap in RPG games especially in terms of storytelling and gameplay. The game was developed by a Polish studio called CD Project RED, and it was quite an astounding achievement to see such small studio with a homemade engine creating a heavy and huge game like this 

On April 17th 2012, CD Projekt RED announced the release of the sequel The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, which was exclusively released on the Xbox360 after the PC release in 2011. This version was of course much more enhanced than the 2011 PC version which included additional items like DLC's new and 

modified locations, and weapons. 

Storyline:

The first Witcher was based on a highly successful novel written by a polish author called Andrzej Sapkowski. CD Projekt RED, were able to transform this novel to an RPG game showcasing in an entirely new and modified way how the novel was more than perfect. 

The first game ended by a failed assassination attempt of King Foltest, and how the protagonist, Geralt of Rivia has managed to unveil and put an end to it. Following this incident, Geralt and Triss Merigold –a sorceress- became King Foltest’s personal advisors.

 The Witcher 2 starts when a coup was about to happen inside the royal family and King Foltest declared a war to end all of this. During this war King Foltest is assassinated, and Geralt gets charged with assassinating him. Geralt escapes with the help of the Blue Stripes leader, Vernon Roche. Accordingly, Geralt sets on a quest to locate the King’s assassin and in the process he discovers more and more about his past and retains his memory after long term amnesia.

The best part of the game is that we have two different storylines in one and they are based upon your choices. During the course of the game, the choice elements are beyond what you can imagine. One choice can lead you to an entirely different location, enemies, events than. The game already has 4 different endings, and every ending has like 16 semi different details.  

This is basically the entire pattern of the storyline; however, there are more and more of crazy twists which are strongly linked to the first game and it's difficult to find a game like this having such mature elements. 

Gameplay:

I can describe the gameplay of the Witcher 2 by saying that it’s "EXTREMELY HARD" unlike any RPG or Hack n' Slash game The Witcher 2 has its own unique gameplay. 

First the combat mechanism became much more effective and faster than the first game. We don't have the limited 3 types of attacks and the quirky system of choosing between them. It was either the bombs, magical spells or traps. The Witcher 2 has a quite smooth choice system and you'll always find yourself outnumbered by different kind of enemies , but it’s not like Assassins Creed where everyone will wait for his turn and try to kill you, Here, everyone attacks you and if they he touch you, a huge part of your health bar will disappear. In such situations, the game has a great element that will be force to use everything you have in the game. Simultaneously, the gameplay teaches you to be ready for any fight. You are forced to enhance your sword with oil and stone, you also get to drink potions. In other words, you should first enter the fight and die to know how you should prepare yourself. 

In The Witcher 2, you can also buy anything you want or you can craft it yourself, as your the skill tree makes you chose your path based on your style. For example, if you want to depend on magic or swords or potions 

In conclusion, the gameplay’s complexity fits the storyline very well and gives you a whole new different experience. 

 Graphics: 

There is no doubt that the PC version has mind blowing graphics and the same goes for the Xbox360 since CD Projekt RED succeeded in perfecting the graphics. The scenery is extremely colorful and delightful; it’s definitely a feast for the eyes. The creators also managed to pay a great deal of attention to the little details in the textures of the surrounding environments. For example, designs of the cities or forests are very well designed and the characters’ facial expressions are in sync with events. 

However, there are some issues like textures that take seconds to be render and maybe that happens because the Xbox360 had limited resources just like it happens in other games. The whole game is like a jewel; your eyes will enjoy looking at it. 

Sound:

The soundtrack is awesome especially while in combat the ambient sounds are perfect since they give the game a beautiful atmosphere the voice acting is very good. I personally I put this game with Mass Effect series as best voice acting in RPG games 

The Final Verdict:

If you want rich and challenging gameplay, thrilling storyline and a new experience in RPG games you should definitely own this game  

Storyline 10:10 

Gameplay 9.5:10 

Graphics 9:10

Sound: 9:10 

FINALE RATING: 9.3:10 

Dont Die On Me !!!!!

My 1 Tb Segate External Hard Drive fell off around a metre and a half distance face first. Well its currently working but heavily scared with allot of bruises meaning I have to find me a new replacement soon before I loose 800 Gigs of historical data. So I decided to upload some of my old guitar work to SoundCloud incase I do loose everything :) Enjoy. http://soundcloud.com/salah-khalilson-masterchief/lunacy-khalilson-productions

My BEAUTIFUL work of Art

That's what happens when you're extremely bored. FYI, there's more where that came from.

A design idea for our team

Since I'm failing miserably at finding a job in this amazingly amazing country we so call Egypt and I'm up til 8 25 am doing nothing I decided , why not open photoshop and mess around a little and ended up with this...

And here are the stock photos I used 

1- For the Background 

2- For the main Upper Logo 

Yes. You see the circular part in the upper middle part of that earth photo , I used that!. Its amazing what you can achieve manipulating images to your liking. It shows the variety of ways humans interpret things. I rotated the image and thats what I saw. Im not an expert in the field of drawing , my sister is. Maybe ill get her to teach me or give me some expert tips ;). 

The Gaming Community

In this post ill be addressing a tone of games, so dont rage quit if I bash your favourite game of all time. In my time I have played alota games. Let me rephrase that , I have played too many games actually. A day ago I decided to buy the Vintage Counter Strike Source off of steam and was reminded of how amazing the gaming community was when I was a child and how some games have been ruined by major publishers in order to milk out as many 60usds out of every mans pocket. ( Yes im bashing Activision and Konami ). Counter Strike Source and CS 1.6 are some of the best competitive multiplayer shooters of all time. Well in the Counter Strike series you have one life and you aim to defend a bomb or plant it , or rescue hostages and defend them. But thats not the point  ,the point is that you have one  life per round and you dont go around spawning all over the map. So team work and skill is essential. Even though alot of camping was involved but  I guess nothing is perfect. In the current generation of shooter games. We have 2 major competitors the infamous Modern Warfare series and the Epic Battlefield series.

Well the first thing that comes out of anyones mouth when I say Battlefield is usually "aww your a Fan Boy HUH!" Infact im the total opposite of fan boy , I assure you I played Modern Warfare 2 and Blackops as much as you did if not more. I got my MW2 copy the 2nd day it came out and was stuck to it like gum. MW2 was an amazing game with a medicore community because 70% of the community was 12 year olds shouting in their mics, but on the contrary the game was amazing and very fun to play. At first everyone thought the game was balanced but by time alota bugs where found and misused eventually nuking any chances of having fun. Every single competitive game out there has alota bugs and misbalancing but if the community is good enough and the publishers aint money whores these things get fixed in a matter of hours but in MW2's case nothing was fixed and the game remained a land of Danger Close / Nube Tubing warzone. ( Incase you dont know what danger close is , Its a perk that increases your explosive damage , when paired with a grenade launcher you can do miracles ). And ofcourse epic lag , as epic lag is the only way to describe it. The entire call of duty series still uses the same host based method of networking that has failed for the past century. Unlike battlefield 3 and bad company 2 which used dedicated servers decreasing the level of frustration by 100%. 

In order to fully understand my gaming ideology you have to first understand the reason why I love competitive gaming. When I play a shooter for example , I always like to improve my skills and learn from my mistakes and to prove that point I had a Kill Death Ratio of 1.2 in MW2 , In Black Ops it jumped to 2.6 and in Battlefield im currently doing a 2.4. Which means that if I have lets say 10 000 kills in total I have 5000 Death , that is if my KDR is a 2.0. I like to understand why I died , was my aiming bad , was I doing a suicide mission , was I shooting too fast and so on and so forth. I bought a Collector edition copy of Modern Warfare 3 , which supports my claim that I am not a fan boy when I bash on MW3. Before even starting to experience the game. I discovered that the game had region locked matchmaking , which in turn means I can only play with Egyptians at first I was actually happy because most Egyptian gamers are casual gamers so ill be pawning alota noobs ( I said Most of them , incase you got offended ). I could only join almost 5 games in 2 days and I eventually gave up and put it back on the shelf. Afterwards they released a patch allowing everyone to play together and then the shock hit me. The game is nothing but pure rubbish , Disgusting spawns , worst connection issues in my lifetime and nothing but bullcrap. In MW 2 I got an uncountable number of nukes without boosting ( a nuke is a 24 kill streak ) , in MW3 I was barely able to kill 3 people without spawning mindlessly again and again. I never cared to learn the game or even play the single player because of how disgusted I was. 

 The reason why Modern Warfare 3 and 2 are so accessible is the fact that you can run around kill a bunch of people by spraying them mindlessly with bullets and be happy about your lucky accomplishment and if you die you never get punished for it you just spawn again instantly. But in Battlefield 3's case you take ages to spawn again and no you NEVER randomly spawn anywhere you spawn at your base or on a friend or on a captured flag. So in that 10 second spawn time your like Hmmm why did I die hmm I guess I was running around like an idiot and my team was in a totally diffrent position for example. But in MW3 your just mindlessly spawning over and over. Alota people defend MW3 as a good game because they dont like to wait to spawn and dont like to work hard for kill they just like to run get 2 people die , spawn run kill 1 die spawn run die. Then comes the community issue Battlefield 3 has one of the strongest communities in gaming where everyones playing to be better or playing to have fun and changing the game to the better. For example at first a weapon of mass destruction was found, aka the USAS combined with frag rounds. Technically your walking with a fully automatic canon shotgun. I personally had alota fun playing with it but everyone knew it was over powered in a matter of weeks the gun was patched the USAS is now almost useless unless you want to suppress the shit out your enemy while your team kills them. 

Another epic example of amazing communities is  Starcraft 2 even though Starcraft aint a shooting game it's a strategy / economy managing game with alot of thinking and planning involved which most Egyptians hate doing. I was first introduced to SC2 by Khalid , he was like " Give it a shot you might like it" . Actually I fell in love with it. As its as good as a virtual chess match, that's how much planning is involved. I played my first 10 games where I lost all of them and at the beginning of every game my opponent had to type GL HF. At first I was like umm ok. Then I had to ask because it was getting on my nerve's and apparently it meant Good Luck Have Fun and at the end of every game the loser had to say GG ( good game ) even if it was an ugly motherfu**ing game. To make you guys understand how good the community is. I was playing a game as Zerg versus a Terran player ( Zerg , Terran and Protos are races in the game ) . I was ofcourse crushed because I was still learning so I was like GG and left. After I left the game the dude privately messaged me, took me to a private game and taught me how to defeat his build with Zerg and I actually beat him. The dude knew I was a noob and he helped for no apparent reason , thats how good the community is. Since then I have watched every single North American Star Leauge game ( A starcraft 2 tournament ) learning from the best of the best and ofcourse lets not forget the all the MLG tournaments. 

How can you call MW3 a good game. When activision is just milking the series with a game each year with absolutely no graphical development or engine development , in fact they have been using the same engine since modern warfare 1.  All the current major game development companies are all money whores but if the games quality is at stake then no thank you. EA are money whores thats for sure but their developers are still loyal to their fans , Battlefield as a major example. Since I decided to bash on the Call Of Tuty Fruty series why not bash Konami as well for the destroying the living shit out of the Silent Hill Legacy. If you want know more about that check the Twin Perfect Channel on youtube and check out their Silent Hill Experience Documentary. Ive got nothing more than pure love for Fudo and the guys at Twin perfect you guys are legends to me. I can go on forever about how alota current gen games are nothing but bullshit but lets keep it positive we've still got masterpieces coming up , Halo 4 , Gta5 , Beyond 2 souls , The last of us , Dishonoured. Well see you on the Battlefield for now. Ill be posting about the different types of Egyptian so called gamers we have here in this beautiful country. Shalamoz