The Witcher - Review @ GameDaily & Kotaku

After a short run of positive reviews for The Witcher comes GameDaily, who don't sound like they enjoyed anything about it.  The score is 6/10 and here's an except from the end:

The Witcher also has a day and night cycle, with the worst monsters coming out in the evening. Although there's nothing wrong with this, areas to rest and further the clock are spread out, and nothing is quite as annoying as waiting for some NPC to wake up, or for the sun to set so that some monsters can finally rise out of the water, but all of these issues build up to a larger one. It's hard to care about the story or any of the characters. Even though the game graphics generate some pretty good looking characters, they all lack facial expressions, and most don't even use hand gestures. With that said, characters rattle off lines while staring blankly into space, like statues with moving mouths. This game even has the silly role-playing convention where players can walk into any house and poke through the cupboards, cabinets and chests to take anything they please without repercussions. Then toss in the side story about non-human races like Dwarves and Elves forming guerilla squads against humans, and the narrative becomes almost impossible to take seriously, especially since the humans nicknamed these groups "squirrels."

...Kotaku's article isn't a full review but rather some impressions - and much more positive despite issues with the loading times:

Since I saw CD Projekt's PC action RPG The Witcher in action at the Atari room during E3 this year, I've been eager to get my hands on the title. Based on a series of short stories and novels by Poland's premier fantasy author Andrzej Sapkowski, the title promised a rich, atmospheric world, statless leveling, an interesting, combo-driven combat system, and decision system that blurs the lines between good and evil. Happily the final title delivers, albeit with a few minor flaws and one relatively major one. If not for the absolutely staggering loading times, The Witcher would have easily been one of my top PC RPGs of all time.