You play Geralt, a monster hunter searching for someone important to him across an enormous world filled with side stories that often feel as detailed as the main plot. Combat mixes sword strikes, magic signs, and potions, while conversations often lead to difficult choices with real consequences later. It is a huge time investment, with the included expansions adding many more hours on top of an already long main story.
Gameplay video
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Screenshots & review notes
The verdict
Geralt's saga still lands as one of the finest RPGs ever made, and cramming all of it onto a cartridge feels almost absurd. The writing carries real weight even twenty hours into a side quest about a missing goat.
The mechanics
Combat leans slower and heavier than most action RPGs, forcing you to actually read enemy patterns instead of button-mashing through them. The pacing sags in the middle stretch, but Gwent alone could eat a weekend.
Presentation
Visually softened for the hardware, with muddier textures and a lower resolution than you'd want, yet the fog-draped villages and rain-slicked cobblestones still sell the mood. The score remains genuinely haunting.
Staying power
Between the base campaign and two meaty expansions, you're looking at well over a hundred hours. Anyone burned by shallow open worlds owes this one a shot, docked or in bed at 2am.
Frames captured from the gameplay video above; notes are our own take on the game.
What it's like to play
You play Geralt, a grizzled monster hunter with white hair and cat-like eyes, riding into muddy villages and dense forests on his horse Roach while searching for his adopted daughter Ciri. You swing your sword with one button, cast simple magic signs with another, and brew potions before tough fights from ingredients you gather while exploring. The opening hours ease you through a small area teaching sword combat and monster hunting before setting you loose on a vast, war-torn countryside full of side paths.
Most of your time goes into taking contracts from villagers to track down monsters, following clues like footprints and blood smears with Geralt's heightened senses, then fighting whatever you find using the right combination of sign and potion. The main story about finding Ciri can take thirty or forty hours on its own, but side quests here are unusually well written, often turning into small morally complicated stories rather than simple fetch errands, and the included expansions add dozens more hours of content. This is a genuinely enormous game, and a completionist could easily spend over a hundred hours in this world.
On Switch the game looks noticeably softer and blurrier than on other consoles, with distant objects sometimes popping into view late, though it remains playable and impressively complete for a handheld. Combat itself is a little stiff and takes getting used to compared to more modern action games. If you want a huge, story-driven world to get lost in for months and don't mind rougher visuals, this is one of the best around.