What does Rogue Mage have going for itself? The art and general visuals are really nice and feel like a proper representation of the world of The Witcher as a card game, just like Gwent and Thronebreaker do. Also, it's pretty cheap. That's about it. Thronebreaker was alright in its gameplay and pretty good in the whole storytelling and worldbuilding aspect. Rogue Mage completely lacks either. Story just simply isn't there, except for some dialogue here and there. But much more notably, the gameplay is pretty bad. The key component which made Gwent stand out from other games, namely the resource-based aspect of managing your cards and deck, is completely removed. All battles are just a single round and at the beginning of every turn, you draw a card. That's especially sad, considering the base game of Gwent literally has a resource management mechanism built into it, which is one of the key components of every rogue-like deck building game. And for some reason, they decided to remove it entirely and replace it by a generic energy system. If you like Gwent solely for it being based in the Witcher world and having nice card art, go for this game too, I guess. If you want something that actually matches the complexity of that game, you're looking in the wrong place.
