Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

I'm quite amazed that a card game like this would have this much effort put into it. I am just amazed. The Good If you liked Witcher 3 for its story and its characters, then this game is possibly better if not just as good in my opinion. The backgrounds look gorgeous and detailed. I commend the effort the developers have put into this game, and the soundtrack maaaaan. The soundtrack is just spectacular. I do really like how they give you some nice extras and allow you to download the game's soundtrack in FLAC or WAV. The banter between the characters really reminded me of Baldur's Gate 1 & 2. The choices you will make in this game are quite difficult at times too which makes it all the more memorable. The voice acting was truly superb, and they have done a great job with what they were given. The Bad My only few points of critique is that the dialogue at times was kind of cringe. Meve at one point said "you only live once" when I thought she could have said something just a bit better. Few of the puzzles may be a bit too hard to understand fully. You may hate this game if you really dislike card games. Another problem I had was with the little resources you get by increasing the difficulty mode. Other than that. I truly recommend this game. I am at awe at how a simple card game could be this great.

The game keeps in with the atmosphere of the Witcher series, and delivers that in a completely different format: a nice combination of moving around making decisions and playing Gwent-like minigames. A large portion of these games do not follow the standard 2-out-of-3 rule of Gwent, but rather require you to perform a certain task in a 1-round game by playing a certain sequence of special cards. If you like brain-teasers and Gwent this is definitely for you. The only thing I did not appreciate was the waste of effort on looking for chests: they do not contain loot for you current campaign, but eye-candy to be used in the multiplayer.. That said, I had too much of a good time for this small detail to cause and drop in rating

I know there're heaps of gushy reviews of this game, but I wish I'd never bought it. Notwithstanding I haven't the least idea what is going on, the biggest problem is that I'm being asked to admire and assist Queen Meve, who is basically a right royal, hard-mouthed, abusive, tyrannical, murderous bracket. Even if she wants not to hang a peasant guilty of being a witness to a crime, it appears her army gets a fit of the sulks if no-one is hung from a gibbet. The average play time is 22 hours. Presently I'm at 18 hours and sorely noticing the lack of a manual which can explain what this ruddy game's about. If I'm truthful, I'm actually on the side of the peasantry and bandits she's oppressing. Hurrah for the bandits! And Queen Meve? Di'el tak the wight!

A fun game that gave me more of what I was missing really badly: more of the witcher universe. There's plenty of reviews describing the good sides of the game with which I entirely agree so I would like to focus and warn other players about one extremely poor side of the game: if you are among those unlucky few who are actually not few but many you are going to encounter "black screen" fairly often. Those black screens happen fairly often in place of cinematics. If you are lucky you will simply have the entire cinematic freeze with only the sound playing in the background so you will *only* miss on the awesome part of the game story experience if you are less lucky however the entire game won't be playable. The latter is particularly annoying because cinematics usually occur after big final battles and you will have to replay the entire battle which might take up to 30 minutes to do until you will finally avoid the black screen. What's strange is that Gwent itself, the game this stand-alone single-player experience is based on, doesnt have any of such issues. Further down the line you have various solutions suggested by tech support and other players, however neither me nor as I found out most other people didn't find a permanent solution, black screens on cinematics will still randomly appear no matter what you do. However the biggest letdown and the sole reason I'm writing a review focused on such subject is that CDPR evidently did not solve that issue in one year of the game's existence. That made worse by the fact that the multiplayer Gwent has no problem with black screen on cinematics and I normally came to expect better of the company than that. But even leaving aside my high expectations of CDPR I simply can't recommend or give more than 2 stars to a game that is broken for so many players for 1 year after its official release.

TLD;R Great story, decisions matter, intense turn-based strategy, innovative design, superb graphics and polish. You do not need to play Gwent to enjoy this although it complements your experience greatly. Easily well worth the price if treated as an expansion and has a free multiplayer expansion called Gwent if treated as the main game. *** Review Extension I currently have not finished the game so I cannot comment on it's duration but so far I doubt it has replayability outside of unlocking stuff which I would say is more of a chore rather than a fun experience. Given it's a CDPR product however I wouldn't be surprised if there's actually a lot of content beyond my estimation. *** Warning While this is technically an RPG, decision making is generally binary (in the early game anyway) and there's little to no actual character customization. This doesn't stop you from enjoying the great, non-linear story or deep strategic gameplay but it's worth knowing.