The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Review

The Witcher 3 earns its S the hard way: sheer authored density. The Bloody Baron arc alone, a sidequest by structure, delivers more moral weight than most full campaigns, and the game has dozens of threads written to that standard. Velen, Novigrad, and Skellige are not procedurally padded; every hut and shipwreck was placed by hand, and it shows in how rarely exploration feels like filler.

Combat is the honest asterisk. The pirouette-heavy swordplay and floaty Roach handling are serviceable rather than sublime, which is why gameplay sits at A while everything around it soars. But alchemy prep, Gwent, and the mutation trees give the loop real texture, and the Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions are arguably the two best DLCs ever shipped. Building this in REDengine 3, at this scale, with a mid-size Polish studio, was a genuinely enormous swing. It connected.