Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

I feel underwhelmed by Thronebreaker, a game that feels as a gard-came packaged as a role-play game and presented as a graphic novel. The story is praised for being well written, but it is riddled with nonsense made worse by the incessant betrayals. The art of writing a good story is not to attribute inhuman behavior to people, but to make them fail because they are human. Take count Caldwell. When faced by a perceived unbeatable enemy he chooses to submit. Instead of making him a person who has to make an unwelcoming decision, he is painted as a traitorous selfserving coward who is fat and lives in luxury. But why not make more of the dark side of Meve? When she liberates her own country she might cause the utter ruin that Caldwell tries to prevent. But no, at the end it is written that the much more powerful force that is about to fall upon her army poofs out of existence. She didn't even need to have the magic ring drop into the volcano. The writers butcher all of this because they have to provide the audience a story in which the good are good and the bad are bad and invasions are prevented by miracles. As a card-game the game doesn't excel. Your deck consists of only two smaller decks that you can expand upon and nothing more.You do get sets from other decks, but you cannot add to these or change them. As a role-play game the game is weak. Your character, queen Meve is a given. Options are often offered in a black and white manner.You have to make an uninformed decision on the spot and hope for the best. It is all a shot in the dark based on little information with no ability to find out more and with an arbitrary outcome. The weakest aspect of the game is the warfare-element. Warfare is about making tough choices because you have limited resource.s The only choice you get to make is what cards you bring to the table in a battle. There is no strategy in this game. Thronebreaker is a good investment if you can get it for bargain. Perhaps 10 euros?

There is much to love, from dialog and overall story to amazing soundrack.

An interesting turn on the now famous and already tested formula of Gwent with a twist on narration during the Second Nilfgaardian War (the one told in the books). Instead of being just a witcher, killing monsters and saving a daughter, we play as a queen without a crown but with a partisan army against a black sea of nilfgaardian enemies. Instead of being multiplayer, this game is a singleplayer experience with balanced encounters, amazing puzzles, and over the top voice acting and narration. The world is there, it's dark, it's dirty, it's in shades of grey in a morally ambiguous war. If you played any of the other Witcher games, you'll feel right home.

I was into this game solely for the world of Witcher. This game consists of two parts: - An adventure and story part - And a Gwent CCG part. The first part is great: nice drawings, lots of mini story elements where you can make choices, which have effects later on on the story and events. Also, the main story looks interesting so far. The second part, however, is far from perfect. Generally, I love card games, which core element is deck building, but the deck building in this game is VERY limited. You have limitation on the minimum number of cards of your deck, you have a maximum limitation on how many cards you can own from one specific card, you have limitations on special cards, you have a resource limit... and this means there are seemingly a lot of cards you can craft, but ultimately, you cannot. There is barely any new cards later on, so you basically play with the same deck from the beginning till the end of the chapter. At last, there are lots of "puzzles" in the game where you play with a specific deck, so there is some variety - actually, there are more of these matches then matches played with your very own deck, which I've found quite confusing in the beginning (like, there was barely any standard match after the tutorial for hours). All of this caused I had a lot of resources (money, wood and recruit), but I couldn't really spend it on anything useful. Nevertheless, the game itself as a whole is very addictive, and the story kept me playing on and on :)

I was actually sceptical of this game and thus didn't buy it until some days ago. Now I have just finished it and I must say it was a fantastic experience. It really catches the same setting and atmosphere as the other witcher games and books with great characters, interesting stories and tough decisions you will often regret. The cards, fights and the expanding of your army and buildings was also well done. Only on the last act / map there were a bit too many standard 3-rounds fights which in my opinion unnecessarily delayed the ending a bit too much.