"The game should stand on its own", but I must say I loved Gwent in W3. I don't care for PVP, so single player was exciting. It seems they've made it a lot more like hearthstone in the mean time, with more 'damage' abilities and effects instead of building up power. Which might not be bad by itself, but for most of the 'battles' at early hours of the game, you have 'puzzle' fights and 'shortened battles'. In 'shortened' battles you have to just use damage cards to spam damage at certain enemies. In 'puzzles' there is a specific way the game wants you to play your *pre-built* hand of cards and that's usually the only way, any error will just need a restart of the match, especially when you can't know the changing effects in next step of the "puzzle". The only matches I've enjoyed have been the few 'standard battles'. The progression starts off extremely slow, you will not have needed to make a meaningful choice in your deck(or had the option to) for at least 5 hours into the game. The starting deck is in my opinion boring, and almost every match ends with me having two full rows of cards(oh yeah they've removed one row for reasons unclear to me, which accents this problem), and sometimes even the enemies have a full board, and in my example just burned 6 cards into nothing because they couldn't play them, and I won. I've also had enemies take very long turns to think in random battles. Sidequests have felt very much "just MMO sidequests". The main story bits so far have felt very shallow. But I haven't finished it yet. Telltale has killed the visual style due oversaturation for me. If I had had the option to return it, within for example 2 hours, I would have very strongly considered it. Now I'm going to have to give it a few more hours before I'll probably go replay Witcher 3 and love Gwent again. TL;DR: If you loved hearthstone expansions, you'll probably be fine with this game. If you loved Witcher 3 Gwent, but not* hearthsone, you probably won't like this.
