Ah Thronebreaker... After months of waiting it has finally arrived along with Homecoming (which I leave OUT of this review). After finishing the game here are some thoughts (version 1.0); The game is set in the pre-witcher era, centered around the ruler-Queen 'Meve' of Rivia and Lyria. It connects to the eventual 'battle at the bridge' where the Geralt of Rivia storyline starts. The game transitions between dialogues, where you make some tough choices, open maps which you can explore and loot and alot of Gwent fights in between. In alot of ways the game plays like a Telltale series game, with Visuals similar to some Telltale games (realistic shellshaded cartoony). The visuals and story are a great adition to the universe. The choices you make have short and long term consequences which is also nice. Now for the Gwent gameplay in between... On this I am torn. The concept is you can build your own army, by adding units (which turn into cards) to your deck, depending on gameplay choices some units stay, some go. The mechanics are a little different from the multiplayer Gwent, but very fun. Some fights are standard Gwent battles, others are puzzles with special rules. However, after the first chapter it seems like as you 'build' your army/deck, the enemies retain their weak cards/decks. There is NO challenge at all. I played this game on the 'hardest' difficulty, and at times it felt like I could win while playing with my eyes closed, having 5-10x as many points on the field as my opponent. This HIGHLY undermines the overal gameplay. Resources, carefull management are all redundant because you win anyway... The looting system also is not balanced, I ended the game with around 20.000 gold, having unlocked everything. Why would you care to loot after this point? Sometimes the game throws a 'hard' decision at you in which you lose some gold for example. This is never a problem though...
