So, lets start with... THE GOOD SIDE 1. Storyline is captivating, well-written and full of interesting characters. It made me care about Meve and wanting to make the right choices throughout the game. While Meve is written as a heroic character, the story is not completely black and white, with suprising twists and grey areas. I loved it. 2. Graphics and sound/music design is superb. Thronebreaker undeniably looks beautiful and sounds amazing. 3. Card game mechanics are nicely fit into the story. If you like card games, this one is really cool. Does not come close to actual Gwent in terms of deckbuilding and gameplay, but it's good enough for a single player game. Most battles and puzzles are just "ok". There are only a few that stand out as great and challenging, but also a few that feel luckluster and badly thought out. Unfortunately, there is also... THE BAD SIDE 1. Balance is severely lacking. I played this game on the hardest difficulty and didn't break a sweat once. I swept aside all enemies in the first two chapters using a random deck I threw together in 3 minutes. After building a solid deck at the start of chapter three, I became virtually unstoppable for the rest of the game. There is no need to adapt a deck for specific battles or bosses. There is no need to optimize a deck. A single, unoptimized, general-purpose deck can beat this game. Very disappointing. 2. This is NOT an open world game. The story is completely linear. There is a single path from beginning to end in every chapter. You can skip some standard battles, puzzles and resources, but all important events have to be played one after another. This also kills replayability of this game. I don't expect to ever play Thronebreaker again, since playthroughs would be practically identical. 3. It feels a little bit rushed and unpolished. There are typos in texts and some card descriptions don't match actual effects. Nothing major, but I still found it frequently annoying.
