Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

Poorly balanced. Playing on medium difficulty and only Act 1 presented any real challenge since at that point your deck's quite limited. But as soon as you jump into the next chapter, any real challenge disappears from the game. That manticore miniboss fight? Visually looked so cool. Designed so cheaply and poorly! Poor UI/UX. Text widgets showing up on top or under reach other. Actions will happen and reactions will trigger with no explanation. Compare that to HS and the way they use language, animation, and graphic design to make sure the player understands the current card and all resulting effects. There's a card that supposed to damage a unit by 5 and if the row is on fire, damage all units by 5. So far, this card has done none of these effects for me. Is that a bug?! Numerous other weirdness such as Gascon not strengthening himself every time a unit has moved or Isbel not counting up the amount of damage done in the round. And yet, it is still quite impossible to lose a game! Other row, opposite row, enemy row, opponent row, all these phrases are interachangeable and mean nothing and everything. You will slowly and painfully realize that it's not what the card tells you but what it does in practice. So be prepared for a lot of wasted plays and tons of repetition. The only positives here are story and presentation. Narrative design is top notch as with all CDPR games and the presentation is pretty and fairy-tale'ish with a hint of "choose your own adventure". Voice acting and audio design is excellent. The camera's motion is also far from smooth when Meve is traversing the map. There's a constant visible lag and jerkiness to it that is quite uncomfortable for the eyes. The original creator of Gwent is gone and it shows. I can't recommend this game at full price. It tried so hard to be Hearthstone, failed, and ended up losing sight of Gwent.

this game was more difficult, but developers are already preparing a patch adressing this issue. I find the story and narration the very alluring, recommending it to anyone who liked Witcher series. In general it is another solid product from CDP RED.

Thronebreaker is a great game. It has a great story, great graphics and a large compaign. Here are the for and against in my opinion; For: -Lovely graphics -Long Compaign -A different take on gwent, including puzzles and stories -Story is great as you'd expect from this dev Against: -The game is so easy, even on the hardest mode. If they managed to double the difficulty, you'd get so many more hours or play. -The standard battles get rather boring when you're half way through the game. Because of the diffuculty, you don't really need to concentrate on building a proper deck. -When big battles happen, the AI tends to lag for me, but is fine on my turn. Perhaps the AIs calcs is slowing it down. I would recommend this game to anyone who likes strategy and the Witcher world. Just don't expect to be too challanged.

Short Points from a long-term RPG fan. * Loved, loved the story. * Loved, loved the characters. * Loved, loved the main story and sidequests. * Gwent battles felt too easy but were still fun. I think for future games it might be nice if you had to adapt your deck more over time, so if you're fighting in the forests some units are powerful, it the mountains other units, attacking a castle etc. Right now if you have a good deck you can pretty much leave it as is. I focused a lot on offensive damage (fire, arrows, pits etc). Even on hard I pretty much breezed through the game and only changed the basics of the deck once when Black Rayla left. I think I lost 1-2 of the big battles over the entire course of the game. * Gwent puzzles were more work than fun I thought since every encounter had new mechanics. I think enjoyable gameplay mechanics is something you learn and then perfect as the game progresses. Learning new mechanics for every puzzle by trial and error just gave me a headache. Maybe others feel different. * Losing some party members because of certain encounters felt a bit harsh, I lost Gabor because I nullified the Nilfgaardian laws in a Rivian town. I was one his side long-term but didn't feel that this was the time to make a stand for those views. Maybe in a couple of years there could have been such a discussion with the Rivians, but not during wartime or after they've helped me retake a city. I've heard similar things from other players too. I think some kind of mechanic to explain your actions to leaving party members and potentially still have them in the party might have been good. Might not work 100% of the time but sometimes I've you're lucky. * The savegame system... yeah. Hmm. On one hand it prevents save-scumming but sometimes you really just click the wrong button or misread something. Overall a great experience because of the story though!

Thronebreaker is a shinning example of what a spin off game should be. It is a true Witcher universe game, and manages to push the depth and life of the world pushing the reality of it to new places while never losing sight of the RPG style that makes the Witcher games what they are. It is a beautifully self contained game and doesn't rely on it's larger counterparts to carry it. The game is built around it's incredibly engaging story and plays more as interactive story telling fully utilizing gorgeous cutscenes tough decision making and one of the best protagonists any game has ever offered up. Beautiful and deep the game never feels like it's missed the mark with story. Be prepared to feel angry and wrathful, heartbroken and defeated and feel proud as Meve struggles to regain her lands. Thronebreaker also expertly blends Gwent in new and refreshing ways that make this version of Gwent unique and not just a repackaging. The game as a whole does not feel like CDPR simply gathered old assets and gave made a cash grab. The game is thoughtfully made and well worth it's price tag. In short. Thronerbreaker is a beautiful story driven game dripping with style and depth spanning 30 hours of game play or more that will engage players with tough decisions excellent character developement stellar Gwent and one of the best protagonists games have to offer.