The game is barely functional. While the actual gameplay is fairly true to when it was new, the menus freeze and move in slow motion. Making any kind of configuration change is agony and reloading after dying is downright torture. And believe me... you will be dying a lot. The default controls are also set to the arcade controls, making the game even more cumbersome to use without configuration. Give this one a pass, it is not well maintained or truly playable.
Similar to how Duke Nukem Forever's genuine sexism completely failed to get the joke of the pixelated bewbs in Duke Nukem 3D, Magnum Cum Laude totally misses the joke that made Leisure Suit Larry funny and its arcade gameplay udderly fails to deliver the same type of engaging experience of the series. It's worse than just missing the point, too. It's the most garbage type of filler gameplay. Eating your time by having you run around with graphics that were dated even when they were brand new. This is something that people don't appreciate about a good older game... is a good game is designed to look aesthetically pleasing with the graphics it has. And Magna Cum Laude drops the ball here as well with stiff animation, awkward composition, and tragically unpleasant character design. This never looked good. It failed both technically and artistically. I can't as harshly critique the comedy, because that's a very subjective area. What I can say is that for me, a fan of the series as a whole, I was disappointed. I found the comedy to lack the satirical edge of the franchise. Fart jokes are the bread and butter of the Larry games, but they've always been more elaborate fart jokes, and here they're just... fart jokes. Maybe I was too disappointed by everything else to appreciate it, but it just felt like it didn't get the joke. I can imagine the player who would enjoy this. Probably someone too young to play the game. But, I've played some of the newer games since then, Reloaded and Wet Dreams Don't Dry, and both entertained me far more throughout than any single joke in this whole game. Give it a pass unless you're just an insane completionist. But if you do try it, and hate the first 10 minutes, know that it doesn't get any better at all.
I would have liked this game more if I'd been prepared for what it really is, Gwent with a story. While there are elements of strategy, role-playing, and adventure, they are extremely thin. The strategy element (outside of Gwent itself) is whether or not you want to collect all the resources on a map, the adventure element is limited to the linear path through a map with little reason other than digging up treasure to move back, and the role-playing is equally light as the story is largely just exposition with a few choices. This isn't inherently bad. Gwent is a fun game, and it's a beautifully designed game with some excellent implementation. As a cornerstone to build a game on it works well. You can handle combat with it, story events can be played out through it, and you even have puzzle missions that can only play out one way which must be solved. Going into this craving a deeper Gwent experience will yield the best results because the Gwent is so well done that it's easy to give a pass to everything else as just window dressing. It's very similar to Puzzle Quest. However, that Puzzle Quest better integrates its game mechanic and minimizes the time you spend doing non-puzzle tasks. Thronebreaker doesn't. It's tiring traveling around the map. There's some quick travel, but it doesn't really alleviate how flavorless the navigation is. The dialog is very heavy given how little interaction you have with it, and I never really felt like the conversations were meaningful to my journey. So I take issue with the description of Thronebreaker as an RPG. As a role-playing game with narrative-driven exploration, Thronebreaker fails pretty hard. But, as a Gwent game that elevates the mechanic of Gwent to the core method for interacting with a story and world, Thronebreaker is okay.
