Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

This is my first gwent experience and i have not played a main Witcher game, only this spin-off. I dont have a good pc and this game runs really good on high settings. Thats quite positive. After I played through the rushed and packed tutorial i got kicked into the world with the sentence: Your tutorial ends here. I was not ready. The mechanics were just described very rough and no deckbuilding or upgrade tent stuff was explained in detail. I quit the game that evening because i went to the bottom right after the end of the tutorial. There are some fisher huts and a monster that eats some flesh and it had a puzzle icon over its head. I think: Nice now i can try out the few things i was roughly told about and fail, but i couldnt. The game just straight up crashed after i clicked on the enemy. What a good first impression. Next day I started Gwent to learn about the card system. It was better explained in Gwent in my opinion. There are still so many questions open about some weird effects in the first sentence of a card that were not explained and I still have many questions about this base thing. After playing 2-3 online matches I saw some combos and recognized the skill it takes and the game was not just pure randomness anymore for me. (The tutorial was not good. You could not choose what card to play or what things to be explained, and thats why I thought that everything in the tutorial went without any randomness well and you had no chance to loose a round, exept the one round when you were forced to loose) All in all I started Thronebreakertoday again and voila: No crash. I think the puzzle was well made and fun. When I continued and went to the chapel graveyard and I clicked on another monster with a puzzle icon the game just froze in the second round. Thats when the fun was over for me. My card that i played turned white, there was no option to exit and i couldnt continue. I had to shut my game down manually. All in all it has the potential but needs fixes.

The story is great, graphics are great, the music is good, puzzles are mostly fun even though there is often just 1 way to do them. My big problem with the game is some really dumb mechanics and some even dumber fights, one fight in particular near the end that I will not spoil. The mechanics I really hate are: - When you use some abilities, if the unit attacks 3 times and kills everything before the last hit, you will have to hit one of your units to end the turn, if there are no targetable units you will not be able to finish the turn. - Depending on how you spawn some units, their spawn ability will not be triggered.

Very good writing where choices actually have cosequences. Remind me of old school isometric RPGs.

First and foremost the RPG and storytelling aspect in this game is absolutely faboulus, S level quality. The voice acting and writing in the game is the best part. Rarely in an a roleplaying game am I able to really roleplay and not consider factors that are out of character. I would say the writing when it comes to roleplaying and choosing decisions is the best I have ever seen. No matter which choice you choose (normally) you feel like you did a "right" choice because your character really answers cleverly, in other games you get disappointed because your character says your choice in a clumsy/bad way that you did not want. In Thronebreaker its the other way around, the phrasing is so well put together that you really get the feeling you are bastardly clever and inspirational character. The actual consequences of your choices are often a bit lackluster though, I really think the "optional" characters are one of the most interesting parts of this game. A part that really pulls you in, sadly how you get and keep the characters are not done well in my opinion. The coolest character in the game that I sadly only saw in one scene I failed to recruit because I respected him, you need to disrepect and force him against his will to get him. Big interesting part of the game that I missed out on for no good reason, it really bugged me the whole playthrough. Optional characters are fun but either you need more of them or you need to do it a bit better how to get and keep them. Some important choices in this game are made with absolutely 0 knowledge of the circumstances, you walk in on a mob beating one person, do you stop them or not? Hard to say would need to know a little bit more than that to make a decision. The gameplay in itself is good, not great but good sadly the pacing is a bit off. Early on when you want to get into how the game works you get very few ful length battles and mostly puzzles. Later on when you're a bit fatigued its the other way around. Many bugs

I have never played a card game like this before and this is my first game in the Witcher universe so I am 100% unbaised. The card game is fun, the crafting and other RPG elements are well done, the story is good and the music and voice acting are excellent. All in all, this is a solid game. I would give it a 4.5 stars but I chose 5 to counteract all the non-sensical reviews from long time Gwent players who feel cheated somehow by a free game. Apparently the beta was very different from the final product. I hope to see more games like this that use a fun enough card game and mix it with a Tell Tale style novel and Fallout (1&2) style top down RPG navigation.