The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - 10 Glaring Flaws That Immediately Cripple It

7. Combat Feels Very Unresponsive

In the many videos that showed Witcher's combat off before release, it essentially looked like they'd adopted the Batman/Sleeping Dogs/Shadow of Mordor-style of doing things more than before - albeit with a reliance on stat-crunching to see what weapons do the most damage, before speccing accordingly. The past games had this in place as a framework too, but also brought in Dark Souls-style lock-ons to let you crowd-manage groups of foes. For part three it's more of the same, except for some reason CD Projekt have switched up the control scheme to make it fall more in-line with titles like the Souls series. Basically you now have two separate dodge animations and two attacks on the face buttons, with spells/items/inventory wheel toggles on the shoulders - something that's made worse in frantic combat when the spell/Sign wheel refuses to pop up until you're free from engaging a foe again. Witcher 2 let you assign spells to a hotkey mid-dodge, which has been removed - and when you factor in that enemy lock-on is contingent on you keeping them in your view, even the opening Griffin boss comes across as more of a battle with the controller than anything else.