Witcher 1: Is it still playable?

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The Witcher 3 was received insanely well, and it universally loved. Well the 1st installment has been less well known. How well does this stack up?

What is a Witcher?
This will be important to explain for later, and for the series in general. A witcher is a man or woman bred for combat in the most extreme sense. They are trained from a your age to fight both humans and monsters. In their teenage years, they undergo a series of agonizing genetic and alchemical alterations which leave them with a series of outward physical features. Their hair turns white, their pupils become catlike ovals, and they develop inhuman metabolic rates.

The Plot
The story begins with Kaer Morhen, a witcher stronghold, is assaulted by a strange mage and his lackeys. They are pushed back, but the mage escapes with a collection of mutagenic witcher potions. Geralt, the protagonist, sets off after them to recover the stolen goods in a path which puts him back in touch with old friends, and with more sinister plots. The story is rather convoluted, but actually pretty good. I enjoyed the storytelling greatly.

Mechanics
There are a series of potions which you can craft and ingest to alter your performance in combat. Witchers are bred for these potions and in the higher difficulty levels, they are needed. It makes the game more fun to use them I think so I would suggest playing it on a harder difficulty. Be careful though, you can only have so many active at a time or your toxicity will become too much.

There are also 3 combat styles you can swap between on the fly for your particular target of battle. The strong style is higher damage, slower strikes. The fast style is the opposite. The group style uses large swings around Geralt to combat clusters of enemies. This system is interesting, but it isn't all that exciting and I am glad they got rid of it moving forward.

Graphics
Man this game aged poorly. It looks worse than other games released in 2007 by a mile. The UI is also complete trash, but I can overlook that.

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Review: 6.5/10
A good game held back by painfully archaic UI and graphical elements.