Thronebreaker, for me, is a really difficult game to review and say a lot about at this point. I have played it for about 15 hours at this point and whilst I am indeed loving it, I just don’t have much to say on it that hasn’t been said about Gwent already at this point.
So I will start with some of the things which aren’t just Gwent of which there are many I wasn’t aware of, despite the game being out for quite a while on PC now (I have been playing the Switch version over the past week).
Firstly,
the story featured in Gwent the Game Thronebreaker is every bit as
interesting as the Witcher 3, the writing and the characters excel in such a
way that only CDPR are capable of pulling off at this point. Thronebreaker is
set during the Second Nilfgaard War and you take control of Queen Meve (of
Rivia and Lyria for you lore heads out there) as she fights her way across the land undertaking various character
quests and battles, all of which undertake via Gwent rounds and make up the bulk
of the gameplay.
Then there
is the Base building featured in the game which tasks you with… You guessed it!
Building a camp for you and your characters to live in between massive
battlefield skirmishes games of Gwent and whilst I love me some base building
it does feel a little shallow as the only thing you can really do is upgrade
existing camp fixtures to unlock new cards here and there for the Gwent deck.
I really feel that the base building aspects of the game could benefit from some of the character development with certain characters wanting things from the camp to placate them but there unfortunately isn’t any of that.
AND THEN we have Gwent, which is the same old Gwent as you remember it but just a lot more cards and a lot more of it. The basic premise of Gwent still applies (The person with the higher number at the end of a round is the winner) and is a nice simple game which works far better as the background to a huge, globetrotting RPG than it does as the sole driver of gameplay for a 40 hour experience.
I am enjoying my time with Thronebreaker though and as usual the Characters, Story and World are the best parts of a CDPR experience but 15 hours of Gwent battles is starting to grate on me a little bit.
Despite all this however, I will happily give Thronebreaker a 7/10. It has allowed me to dive back into the world of the Witcher and learn more about this world I fell in love with back in 2007, providing me with lore and intrigue which I simply didn’t expect from the little card game I spent most of my time on Witcher 3 collecting.