Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

Im not even into card games but to me Thronebreaker is nothing like Gwent by what I've seen in comparison. Actually we may call Thronebreaker a "Card-Puzzle game with heavy player choice story based elements." I call it a card-puzzle game with "nothing like Gwent" because Thronebreaker has a gameplay loop of each fight adding a specific ruleset to that specific card battle. You will be surprised with each encounter. Be it a story encounter or a side-"quest", each encounter will be most likely a new card based puzzle following the general Gwent set of rules. What I really enjoy in Thronebreaker, though, is the "secret side puzzle focused encounters" in which, by exploring the map, you may find a completely different and unique card fighting puzzle scenario which challenge the player to think, plan and solve what we may call chess puzzle like scenarios with a set of cards and specific ruleset to that puzzle challenge. What a joy to be stuck in a puzzle for 20 minutes and finally have that: "A-ha!" moment. :) So be aware of that if you think Thronebreaker is just a Gwent clone for singleplayer - it is not. But I think Gwent players might enjoy it too. Talking about the story elements; the voice acting is nearly perfect, the story is beautiful and mature with believable consequences of your choices that impact your progression same way as Witcher main series. (Chapter 1 choices affects how factions and people react to you in Chapter 2 and 3, and so on.). I will say nothing more about the story because for it to be enjoyed it must be played. I really liked it.

I never understood the purpose of card games on the computer but it tried it some time ago. I tried this one because of the ratings. The game is not bad and but not great. But coul'd have been great. It seems to me like it wasn't tested properly. The game is slow, the map takes 2 seconds to load? Why it isn't instantaneous when it's alwayst the same? The main character moves slowly and the pathfinding is horrible when you click "far" away. The dialogs are mostly annoying and too long. The puzzles are a good idea but annying, you make a tiny mistake, play over. UI sucks, you have to go the the test to see what's need (it takes ages to load and save of course). The battle animations are ... There's too much or too little of them. Sometimes you can't catch who hit you, sometimes you have to watch 20 hits by one of one character. There's no option to furn off the useless animations. The movies are too longs too. Also I don't think that the dialogue decisions should haunt you few hours later in this type of game. And also what's with those annoying popups like that the battle last one turn that can't be usually skipped by the keyboard??? The battle doesn't load when you read the text, it waits for you to click OK, grrr... etc.

Did you like playing Heroes of Might and Magic? If so you'll very much love this game. Hopefully not too much of a spoiler to tell you there are some cute HoMM Easter eggs in Thronebreaker. The adventure map art is gorgeous. The voice acting and dialogue top flight. The story and lore are true to the Andrzej Sapkowski books. There are two avenues of strategy in the game. The battles themselves, which come in different flavors: standard, puzzle, shortened or containing special story-driving mechanics. The puzzle battles especially offer tremendous variety. And then there is the command tent and the deck building. If you're anything like me you might actually spend an entire session looking at the upgrade trees, tweaking your deck, and playing the practice mirror-AI over and over again, saving in game story progress for another session until after you've sated all your crazy deck ideas. Replay value very high in my opinion. You'll want to try all the different story choices, plus all the different deck archetypes. This feels like a brand new hybrid of game genre's to me. It is a CCG, yet also a single player RPG with fun adventure maps. The mix is fantastic. This engine/platform and the opening narrative framing could be used to tell so many more wonderful Witcher World stories. Given the obvious success of the game at this point (I'm not the 5 star review here folks) I'm delightfully optimistic there will be additional tales to come. This one will always be that special first.

The story of this game is amazing, it keeps you hooked and wanting more; you actually feel invested, it gets very serious and downright depressing at times, but then they'll jab you with some lighthearted fun. You actually care about the characters and the choices you make in the game actually feel like they have weight to them. I'm already planning my second run through just to see what happens if I take other options. The card game itself is very fun and both intwine to make a really great product worth every penny. I hope CDPR keeps making more Witcher tales, this one was fantastic.

I have no intention of playing Gwent, but this game does pack a good story. Also good solid fun game play. Way better story than Cyberpunk.