It is an awesome game, and depending on a few games like LA Noire, Deus Ex, Battlefield 3 and Uncharted 3, will probably be my GOTY. However it isn't without its negatives...

Difficulty -

I had planned to play through the game on Easy my first time through, and I certainly didn't didn't expect to die as much as I did. It is very easy to get swarmed by enemies and die in seconds. On my second playthrough I switched to normal and I managed to get to the courtyard fight in the monestary before you raise the gate to let Foltest in, and I just got bored of it.

Constantly rolling in, hitting an armoured enemy once or twice and rolling away, over and over again. If you get hit you end up running around the courtyard in circles until you health regenerates...I mean it is just ridiculous. Geralt is supposed to be a bad ass, and at no point in the Prologue on normal difficulty did I feel like a bad ass.

I read somewhere that the developers loved Demons Souls and wanted to implement a similar level of difficulty. Well, they are nothing a like. Demons Souls' difficulty was never monotonous, and no normal enemy ever took longer than 15 seconds to kill. I tried using signs and traps, but at that point in the game your signs are weak and you don't have a lot of gear to work with.

Also the fact the game doesn't allow you to drink potions on the fly is a bit weird, but that's more personal preference.

Combat -

The combat is much improved from the original (which I still didn't mind), but it does feel slightly loose. Perhaps holding down a button to lock on to an enemy would have been better. Still I did enjoy the combat for the most part.

Stealth sections -

Sometimes they work (lke in the dungeon), and sometimes they don't (sneaking through the camp). Stealth is a hard element to implement in a game that focuses on action, so I'm not too bothered about this.

The save system -

After consulting this forum earlier today, I wiped the majority of the contents of my save folder, which amounted to 3.7 GBs... WHY OH WHY does a manual save take up a new slot every time? Why can't I just pick from a number of slots like in the first game? This should be relatively easy to fix...

Crashes -

Every hour or two my game will boot me to the desktop for no apparent reason. Normally happens when I open the menu or enter a door. This is what led to the manual saves every 5 minutes, which in turn led to the 3.7GB save folder, and the complete slowdown of the menu system as a result (sometimes opening the menu would take 12-15 seconds).

Gamepad issues -

They bigged up the fact that this game was designed with a gamepad in mind, and for the most part it works. However, a few things could be tightened. When you are trying to bribe someone, the keyboard doesn't work, which means you have to hold down the left stick until you reach the allotted amount. If the bribe is rejected, you have to do it all again, from zero...which is massively time consuming. All they have to do is either let you type in a number or remember what sum you got to last and open on that sum.

Some of the menus also spaz out a little on the controller. Scrolling through mutagens one by one is impossible on my gamepad, they normally skip two or three, even if I use the d-pad.