If you remember my Witcher review from 2007, on the 30th of October, you will probably recollect that I really did like the game. I found the Witcher to be a breath of fresh air in a pretty stagnant genre that was lumped in with various Square-cloned J-RPGs and cheap imitations of Diablo and Baldur’s Gate. Overall the game was met with a sterling response from my peers in the gaming press and only a few people truly disliked the game.

Now it’s the 23rd of September 2008 and I am looking at my own personal copy of the Witcher Enhanced Edition, since Atari once again have failed to provide one and since I did the original review just like this, it seems fitting that once more I’ll be taking a look at the EE whilst we wait for Atari to hopefully ship ours. The only reason that I’m doing this (which I very rarely do) is that I believe the Witcher deserves all the press it can get.

So, if you need to refresh your memory you can find my original review here at The Witcher Review

I really didn’t think that they could make the game any better than it was; I secretly hoped that they could of course. I was proven wrong, oh, so wrong. Over the last year CD Projekt RED have taken one of the greatest RPGs of 2007 and re-vamped it to such an extent that it feels like a different game. I doubt it will win over the likes of those who disliked it the first time around, since to them RPGs are fundamentally flawed whether they feature real time combat, turn based battling or none of the above.

The Witcher Enhanced Edition is available as a box set packed with goodies, DVD features and two CD’s worth of soundtracks that are superb. I could go on about these alone being worth the price of the retail box, but for anyone who owns the Witcher you can simply download everything from the EE off the community site.

Witcher Community Site

The meat and potatoes of the EE is however in the upgrade and the re-recorded dialogue re-written English script, over 5000 lines of redone voice acting brings the world closer to the original vision that some people were lucky enough to experience. Most of my gripes with the voice acting from the last version have been thrown out of the window and even Geralt sounds better. There are still a few bits of dialogue that don’t quite sit right with me and some deliveries from the NPCs could have been better still.

These are minor niggles in what has now become, essentially, one of the best RPGs of all time.

There is a wealth of language/subtitle options to choose from in the game, enough to support all the language/region choices you could desire. Want to play the game in English but with newly recorded German voice overs, you can!