Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales (2018)

In fact, the game starts off well, but then you start encountering puzzling gwent parts and the game quickly becomes unplayable. The game doesn't explain what to do in these parts and you have to look for a guide on the internet.

The graphics and visuals are very good and the story looks interesting, but the gwent system is very confusing and the game makes no effort to teach it to you. It should be like the gwent system in Witcher 3.

On the other hand, in a game where your choices are claimed to affect the story, the fact that you can't save more than once and everything you do is automatically saved is a huge design flaw.

When the game is at its easiest difficulty, it allows you to skip the gwent parts that you can't pass, but after that point, the game doesn't offer you anything in terms of gameplay. You just walk and collect resources and then read dialog and that's it. Having to skip the core mechanics ruined the gameplay for me and made me feel like I was just watching a boring interactive animated movie.

The developers of Thronebreaker couldn't understand why Witcher games are so popular. Gwent can be fun as a side content at most. Witcher 3 already had this mechanic as a side quest and it wasn't that complicated. They complicated the system too much and tried to make a game with a gameplay consisting only of Gwent, but there was no need for Thronebreaker when there was already a game called Gwent.

Only playable if you're really into gwent. As it is, its potential is wasted and if you expect a story-driven RPG like me, you will be disappointed.

Steam Curator

The version of Gwent we see here is an incredible re-imagining of the minigame from the Witcher 3, with a high quality story wrapped around it.

Thronebreaker is one of the most well paced and varied games I've played all year, and it's astonishing how much they were able to convey with such a simple ruleset. One moment you'll be engaging in warfare against another army, the next you will be competing in a drinking contest against a dwarf, both of which are contextualized within the games cards.

If you like card games, RPGs, or both, play this game.

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Nice spin-off in the Witcher series focused on story and Gwent. This game is only for those people who enjoyed Gwent in Witcher 3, because it's the core mechanic here.

Normally, I don't play collectible card games, because they're mostly about online PvP battles, and I suck at deck building. So it is nice to have a story-driven card game in one of my favorites universes. This game is quite challenging, I had to restart some battles several times, and used guide for some puzzles. But it's nothing compared to the final boss: I couldn't beat him for three evenings and finally managed to do it by accident.

Overall, I really liked Thronebreaker and can recommend it to every fan of The Witcher series.

I was looking for a quick, casual game to play and enjoy deckbuilders like Hearthstone and Monster Train so I thought I would try out Thronebreaker.

This is anything but a casual card game. It's a full blown RPG that will take at least 30 hours to complete. I could not believe how long the game is.

I came for the card games but really ended up staying for the writing. It is a great story with very memorable characters and scenes. The music is top notch, I will definitely be adding songs from this game's soundtrack to my Spotify playlists.

What is ironic is that towards the middle of the game, I really started to loathe the card game battles. I just wanted to continue on for the story which is the complete opposite of why I jumped into this game. I think that may have been partly my fault for choosing the easiest difficulty though. I was easily stomping every battle so I had no incentive to change up my deck, experiment with new cards, etc. At the same time however, the game felt so long I'm glad I didn't spend a lot of time tweaking decks and retrying battles. However there are "puzzle" battles pretty frequently (almost half the battles I'd say) which give you a preset deck and you need to figure out the exact combination of cards to play in order to win. You get to try as many times as you like too. These were the high point of the card game in my opinion.

I think the length could have been shorter to mesh better with the deck playing mechanics, otherwise I thought this was a masterpiece. Give it a shot if you enjoy Witcher or lengthy RPG stories.

CDPR know how to do video game storytelling right. After hundreds of hours in The Witcher 3, I was excited to revisit the world with Thronebreaker. It's a totally different game and while the Gwent implementation is done well to help the story progress, it's really just a tertiary part to the overworld exploration and choice-making that furthers Queen Meve's tale.

Thoroughly recommend this one if you enjoyed The Witcher 3 or love a game that really makes your choices matter.

Thronebreaker is a single-player campaign card game set in the world of The Witcher series. It takes the foundations of Gwent, one of the best mini-games ever implemented into a AAA game and use it to create a very unique experience that was way better than I anticipated.

The game is divided into two main parts: there’s a choose-your-own-adventure system that has the player controlling Meve, the Queen of Lyria and Rivia, as she fights a war to reclaim her kingdom during an invasion by Nilfgaard. The card game is used as the combat system for the game, which leads to a really interesting combination of gameplay and narrative.

The story is very good and was excellently presented. I thoroughly enjoyed the art style and sound design and the voice acting was just as good as what we got on The Witcher 3, with a plus by the fact that the narrator did a much better job than what Dandelion did on that game. Side characters were generally awesome and the game forces players into tough decisions, with impacts on both story and gameplay. The tone is the same grim/dark fantasy of The Witcher, with plenty of horrible stuff happening, but it makes good use of humour to lighten things whenever possible. I had a particularly fun time by playing it while reading the book series, as I could see how much of a good job they did on presenting those moments from the books, even if it doesn’t directly follow book events (though it actually shares an amazing scene with Baptism of Fire, a great book for which I wrote a short, spoiler-free review on Goodreads last year, if anyone cares about it).

As for the Gwent game, I think they did a pretty good job. Throughout the game Meve is capable of recruiting a fairly large force, with new cards being added constantly, allowing players to have fun customizing their decks in order to approach fights however they want. There’s a good variety of encounters, pushing players to attempt different strategies and cards for each of them. The quality of each of them, however, wasn’t super consistent, with some being quite boring to me. This is mostly true when it comes to Puzzles – predefined encounters where players have to use a specific set of cards to complete specific objectives. Some were very creative and fun to go through, others didn’t make much sense or pretty much solved themselves for me. Overall, I enjoyed the upgraded mechanics and think this version of Gwent is much more engaging than the mini-game from Witcher 3.

I played the game on the standard difficulty and felt it was very easy in general. It’s worth of note that on easy mode you can skip fights entirely and focus on the narrative if the card game is not your thing. Also, many battles are avoidable even on the other difficulties, but choosing not to fight may prevent you to experience a lot of good content.

Thronebreaker is an excellent story-driven card game that makes great use of the Witcher’s setting to tell a compelling story with a fun battle system. I highly recommend it to players who enjoy immersive narratives, but experts on card games may think it is a bit too simple for them. I also think its pricing is quite fair, given its decent length (30+ hours). I hope you guys can enjoy it as much as me.

I pre-ordered Thronebreaker because I was really into Gwent (at one stage I was ranked #281 in Oceania) and loved the premise of a fully fleshed-out story with card game mechanics. And somehow, despite the months of hype as the release date slowly approached, Thronebreaker was even better than I had hoped for. Well, when it worked.

First, the pros:

• -It was a wonderful length: 40 hours it took me to comb over every map and find every secret for my first playthrough.
• -The exploration. There were so many secret battles, puzzles and weapons to discover. Just my kind of game!
• -The art style. I loved seeing Meve's cloak flick out behind her as she ran.
• -Truly incredible voice acting.
• -A lovable and super cool protagonist. She inspired me many times, and if I were one of her soldiers I probably would have died for her.
• -The gameplay. I love the Gwent card game!
• -An excellent story that threads into the canonical narrative of The Witcher books. (Having read about them, I knew when and how Geralt would appear, and it was nevertheless tremendously exciting to fight alongside him.)
• -The storytelling itself was masterful. More than just an entertaining plot, the use of an actual storyteller to reveal the narrative was perfectly suited to the adventure. The combination of his eloquence and the twists and turns of the story made for a thrilling adventure.
• -The choices! I love games that force you to make moral decisions, and Thronebreaker was chock full of them. Some of them I thought I handled wonderfully, only to have them bite me later. Other times I made tough calls, and was later rewarded for the risks I had taken. And other times still, I made moral decisions knowing that my party members would desert me and that it was a price I was willing to pay to do what I felt was right. I loved that the game auto-saved as soon as each decision had been made so there was no reloading save files when things backfired. However I must admit that the decisions weren't always clear: for instance, I ordered a man to be whipped thinking it would be ten lashes at the most, but instead he was scourged so badly it left him crippled for life. (I closed the game before the dialogue finished and it autosaved, and replayed a whole battle just so I could spare him from that fate.)
• -The ending. I love games that have an epilogue and tell you about what happened to your party members after the story ends.

Unfortunately, the game lacked some of the polish I was hoping for. Here are its cons:

• -There were a few game-breaking bugs. Sometimes it would just freeze and I'd have to restart it. Other times it would take two minutes for the enemy to make a move (which was awful when they had 5 cards left and kept drawing new ones even though I'd passed.) Sometimes I couldn't navigate the menu - pressing up or down to get to the next row of cards would just skip to the top or bottom of the page. Worse still, cards wouldn't activate in the way they were supposed to: I'd carefully save my best card til last, expecting it to completely turn the tides and it just wouldn't activate.
• -The resources were pretty meaningless for most of the game. After the first two stages, I had more resources than I could spend: I'd unlocked all the useful upgrades and I had more cards than I could use. I finished the game with 50k gold, 15k wood and 1k recruits. I wish it had affected the ending somehow - I felt like I could have single-handedly provided the resources to rebuild the kingdom.
• -The story choices, while wonderfully, didn't really have any consequences. At worst, one of my followers would leave, which was fine with me because none of my strategies depended on them. More often, there'd be a drop in morale, or a cost of a few resources.
• -Once I found a particular combination of cards that worked really well for me, I never really used any other strategies. Sometimes I'd take out my best cards and try new ones just for some variety, but for about 80% of the game I just used the same cards because they were by far the most efficient. In the end, my gameplay experience became about getting lucky in the draws rather than having a superior strategy.

Ultimately I really loved the game, but it had some frustrating moments that took the gleam off the top. Without the bugs, with a rework of the resource system, and with a revolving deck that didn't allow me to use the same strategy in every stage, this would have been a 5-star for sure.

I preordered the game when it was revealed, expecting nothing less than a really good game. I have a lot of faith in CD Project Red and their games.

I was blown out of the water. I didn't expect it to be THIS good, it could easily have been a full price game for the amount of content you get. I have about 30 hours put into it, and I almost completed everything there was to do in the game. It has many different endings, just like The Witcher 3, so there's room for replayability.

I'll go over some of the less good things before coming back to what made it really good. It had a few bugs and text errors here and there. I noticed a few gameplay bugs which made some cards not behave the way they were supposed to, but nothing which hindered my progression. Towards the middle part of the game, the puzzles became very simple and easy to solve in one try. I like the fun puzzles, but they shouldn't take 10 seconds to figure out. Towards the end of the game, fighting Nilfgaardian outposts became a bit of a chore, they all had the same cards and I always beat them 200 to 0, even on the hardest difficulty.

-More spoilers in the next part-

So what was really well done in the game? What stood out most to me was the story, dialogue, characters and voice acting. It's really impressive and it was like reading a book, since there is MUCH text in the game. The characters are very likeable and I felt for them when they left my company one way or another. If you've read the books, one part is going to be very familiar - The Battle of the Yaruga. I smiled widely when I saw what was coming with that part. And to see it from Meve's point of view made it really cool. If you haven't read the books, but do it after playing this, it will be the other way around and likely just as cool.

The art and environments were fascinating and good looking, and most puzzles were very creative. I liked the one which was a nod to Hearthstone, it was fun. My favorite location in the game has to be Mahakam, I enjoyed the snow and all storylines between the dwarves. And I can't forget the music, it was exceptional as well, throughout the entire game.

-no spoilers left-

Conclusion:

I highly recommend this game to anyone who likes Gwent, read the Witcher books, or just like a damn good story adventure! It gets a 9/10 from me.