Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

I found myself sometimes starting up THE WITCHER 3 just to lay down some cards. Apparently I was not the only one, as CD PROJEKT RED soon announced a standalone GWENT game, mainly intended for multiplayer sessions. This standalone caters more to single players, featuring a story which is very good with decison making added. You move around a world map and collect resources around the map, manage a camp and fight out battles - GWENT style. It feels and plays just like the HEROES OF MIGHT & MAGIC series with tactical combat replaced by GWENT. And it works! Got it for $30 - half price of an AAA game, which is fair. The conversations, which make out a large portion of the game a fully voiced even with a narrator for between the dialogues. The voice acting is very good. Note that if you were a GWENt expert in THE WITCHER 3, the rules are different here. There are much much more cards and some special rules.

The game is so easy on any difficulty - I mostly was bored. Until the last battle which is completely broken and RNG dependant. Such a bad design.

It is a wonderful RPG experience and a welcome addition to the Witcher games, however playing on the hardest difficulty I can say that there is no challenge. Granted I play a lot of card games, and have played a decent bit of Gwent but I feel that on the hardest difficulty, on a game that is marketted towards people who already play Gwent, I should lose at LEAST one match in the entirety of a playthrough. The only times I did end up losing were a few awful 'puzzles' which are usually quite charming. Potential Spoilers following this sentence. Puzzles where I need to play through multiple times to find out as much about hidden information, whether it be face down cards of my 'opponent' or the specific sequence of cards in my deck are NOT puzzles, they are time wasters that will inevitable solved due to a very straightforward line of thinking. Oh and the amount of time it takes for the game to register an action during a puzzle and give me the ability to take an action is mind numbing ESPECIALLY on the match and memory 'puzzle' .

I loved the story and the moral decisions but when it came down to the gameplay i was disappointed. I like GWENT and card games in general but the game was way to easy to me. I played whit the hardest difficulty and still had no trouble absolutely destroing everybody whit almost no effort at all. And that got still very quicly. I had also heard that the puzzles were hard and chalenging. Well.. to me the hardest puzzle took about 10 min to solve. Even whit the gameplay being dull i enjoyed the game because to me the narrative is most important.

If I would like to point three best things about this game, that would be: beautiful visuals, rich story and difficult choices. The game is suprisingly beautiful. When I was watching it before release I found it just interesting. But as soon as you start play it yourself, you see all the little details, animations and cutseen - this is just an eye-candy. The second thing is a story. A typical, rich and deep story. Every time I was playing this game, I felt like sitting in a comfy chair with a warm cup of tea in hand. Masterpeace. As for the choices - I usually try to make a good choice if possible in the game, so I can see "the good scenario" in the end. This game... is different. You have to make choices, all the time. And difficult once. There is no way around it. IMHO this is one of the reaseons why this game plays so well. When you read the book, you kind of stand on the side and judge, here it's a different story - the blood is on your hand and you are resonsible for consequences. It is a little bit annoyng at first, but then it lets you understand Meve's situation. There are of course couple of things I would do differently, like f.e. fast-travel system is not needed here at all, I've never used it once. Or the fact that you have to click every time you want conversation to move forward. But those are all minor things. To summarize - this was a suprisingly good experience. I expected a lot from CDPR and - as usual - they fullfilled those expectations with a little bit more :)