The Witcher [PC]

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Assuming you can leave the girls alone long enough to really sink your teeth into the game's storyline, you'll find it's a real gem. Although it starts with a huge cliche - guess what, you're an elite monster hunter who's somehow lost his memory - The Witcher's sinister plot spins itself into a tremendously compelling yarn.

It's not all black roses in The Witcher's world, though, and chief among its issues is the dialogue. Not only is it badly translated, with all the confusion, head-scratching and non sequiturs that entails, but it's voiced by a cast that runs the gamut from decent to dire. It's as if they ran out of money half-way through recording the English voices and had to rely on whomever they could scrounge up to fill out the numbers. The difficulty isn't well balanced, either, and tends to swing from easy to near-impossible with little notice.

That'd be enough to sink a lesser game, but The Witcher's superbly told story keeps the whole thing afloat. If you can look past the lack of polish, you'll find one of the best PC role-playing games of recent years lurking within.

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