Thronebreaker - Review @ Worthplaying

Worthplaying has reviewed the card-RPG Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales:

PC Review - Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales is a single player role-playing game set in the world of The Witcher that combines narrative-driven exploration with unique puzzles and card battle mechanics.

In 2015, it released a fantastic RPG in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and for many, the card collecting game Gwent was a captivating piece of side content. Three years later, CDPR has spun off Gwent into its own full-fledged story-based card game, and the results are nothing short of a masterpiece. With fantastic writing, gripping game mechanics, and fun side-quests to break up the tense drama, Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales is a masterclass example of a well-crafted card game. It takes great strides in revolutionizing the CCG genre, and it's one of my favorite games released in 2018.

Gwent was a fantastic addition to an already vast collection of content in Witcher 3. To spin off the card game into its own stand-alone game though, CDPR needed to do much more with it, and in that regard, the title has more than exceeded my expectations. Forget everything you know about Gwent. This is a whole different animal with new rules, significantly more depth, and a ton of new factions and cards to explore. The end result is a competent card game that can compete with the best card games available today.

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Overall, Thronebreaker is a revolutionary game within the CCG genre, and I hope other companies take note. With a 40-hour story to support an engaging card game, there's nothing else quite like it, and its unique nature is to its overall benefit. It's made me realize how much I can and do enjoy card games when they're done right. I always loved the idea of CCGs, but it often takes a lot of time and grinding to get up to par with others. CD Projekt Red remedies this by slowly teaching the complexities of Gwent to the player with an engaging plot to keep players enthralled all the way through. It's time to take all my hard-earned rewards and experience gained in Thronebreaker and have my ego obliterated by a horde of Nekkers controlled by a 13-year-old kid — and I couldn't be more excited.

Score: 9.0/10