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: …
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.
