Witcher 2 not for faint of heart

You’ll make plenty of tough decisions, and mercifully, they generally steer clear of the shopworn good/evil dichotomy so common in Western role-playing games. Where a BioWare game like “Mass Effect 3″ might ask players to choose between saving a settlement or sacrificing its residents to achieve greater power, “The Witcher 2″ asks whether we want to side with a terrorist guerrilla or a special forces unit whose members drunkenly rape and pillage their way through enemy villages.

With a rogue’s gallery of corrupt despots, terrorist sympathizers, prostitutes and drug dealers who peddle laced incense, “The Witcher 2′s” characters talk in language befitting their grim world. “Whoreson” is a common insult.

The game’s sex scenes, while not hardcore pornography, more resemble something you’d see on a show like “The Tudors” or on late-night pay cable.

Profane insults and nudity aren’t something I’ve sought out in games, but it’s refreshing to play a rare console video game that doesn’t feel like it was compromised artistically for the sake of protecting someone else’s children.

For those of you who aren’t adult gamers, imagine how infuriating it would be if it felt like most of the books you read or movies you watched were sanitized and scrubbed to make them more child-friendly. That might give you an inkling of how rare and refreshing a game like “The Witcher 2″ can feel.

That rare feeling of “adultness” will help players overlook some flaws. Although the narrative bar is set high, the game on Xbox 360 is beset occasionally by mild technical glitches.

Both versions suffer what appear to be a Polish-to-English translation issue in at least one spot. It led to a frustrating, half-hour-long search for an item that does not exist.
The game’s quest tracker suggested I use “beehive” bombs to collapse some tunnels. It turned out, though, that there are no such bombs in “The Witcher 2″ and that I was to use something called “grapeshot” bombs. Despite already having grapeshot in my inventory, I spent considerable time trying to find these beehive bombs before I finally gave up and discovered via a Google search that I had the item I need all along.

Eric Wittmershaus is The Press Democrat’s online sports editor. His column appears the first Friday of each month. Follow at twitter.com/gamewit or search for the “GameWit blog” group on Facebook. Email eric.wittmershaus@pressdemocrat.com.