Game: Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales
Genre: Card Game, RPG, Strategy
System: PC/Steam (also available on Switch, PS4, Xbox One, iOS)
Developers | Publishers: CD Projekt Red
Price: USD $19.99 | UK £16.99 | EU € 19,99
Age Rating: US Teen | UK 12+
Release Date: 28 January 2020
No review code used; purchased the game.
It’s not every day that a minigame—especially a card game—gets a full-blown title of its own. Not to mention a whole 30+ hour treatment complete with plot, party members, dialogue choices, and base-building. Yes, the makers of popular RPG The Witcher 3 went all out to make Gwent its own $19.99 game. And is it worth the price? Indeed.
A Game for Non-Witcher Fans?
If you’ve never played the Witcher games but generally enjoy card games and puzzle games, you may yet enjoy Thronebreaker. It’s a bit of a niche taste, but the storytelling is so well done and requires no knowledge of the Witcher series. You’ll only dislike it if you hate grim, brutal war tales where lots of people don’t get a happy ending and the landscape doesn’t sparkle like Candy Crush.
Worried the game might be too hard? There are three difficulty levels. The easiest lets you totally skip battles and puzzles you have no patience for. Yes, you can even skip main-story battles, just to get the plot going. Furthermore, on easy difficulty you don’t have to tweak your deck of cards much. I only had to overhaul my deck for the final battle. So I’m not sure it lives up to the term “deckbuilder”—which is great if you just want a casual experience, but maybe not if you’re a Gwent aficionado.
On easy difficulty, I also ended the game with an overabundance of resources. In between card battles and puzzles, while traveling you search for three resources along the way: coin, wood, and recruits. They’re used to resolve optional quests, build your camp, and buy new cards. Upgrading your camp, which is your moving base, enables new cards to be purchased.
So Thronebreaker is a mix of card battles, puzzles, a smidge of resource management, and a whole ton of story.
The comic-book art style, used for cutscenes and the overworld, is pleasant on the eyes. Most landscapes are sadly dreary and miserable though, as Queen Meve’s story takes place in a war-torn land. The card art, on the other hand, is always a feast to behold—and animations for special cards are impressive.
I enjoyed the Witcher-flavored soundtrack that accompanied this Witcher-flavored world, though it could use an extra track or two for more variety.
The Most Fearless of Them All
Fans of The Witcher may be put out that they won’t be in the boots of Geralt of Rivia here. Geralt does make a brief cameo and you’ll get to use him in one battle. But that’s it.
You’re not missing anything, though, because Queen Meve is a worthy and satisfying protagonist to play. If Geralt was wry and deadly with his blade, Meve is as wry—though deeply capable of compassion, if you wish to be—and as formidable in her courage and charisma. The Queen of Lyria and Rivia is no pushover. She’s, in fact, pretty hard-headed. This comes in handy, as Thronebreaker pits her against a massive invading army, the Empire of Nilfgaard, breaker of thrones.
This is not some throwaway plot. CD Projekt Red put a lot of time into the writing—the dialogue, optional quests, and creating interesting characters. You can see the Witcher formula employed with diligence: “A, but then B.” A plot twist is worked into every corner of the game, down to the short one-para mission descriptions.
And as for the overarching plot, it’s a rare case: the main story is actually more interesting than the side stories. You can expect a good surprise with every chapter. I only wish the epilogue cutscenes were just a teeny bit longer, as the ending felt slightly abrupt.
There’s a massive amount of narrated text. It’s virtually a visual novel. Dialogue and narration can be fast-forwarded, but I often enjoyed listening to the story like an audio book. The voice-acting is pretty good.
Characters are notable too. To be spoiler-free, I won’t say anything of their personalities here. But you’ll want to know that it’s possible to miss recruiting some characters if you don’t pick the right dialogue choices. Also, characters can leave your party if they don’t agree with your choices. Or you can kick them out at certain story junctures. Do that, and their card will disappear from your deck.
Card Game or RPG?
Wait, is this a card game or an RPG? you ask. It’s a card game with RPG elements. You travel across six maps (the sixth is a short epilogue), picking up resources along the way and fighting card battles or solving card puzzles. More on that later.
The RPG inspiration is seen most in recruitable party members (there are several) and story choices. The story choices are what make Thronebreaker (and the Witcher) notable: they’re often hard moral choices, sometimes between two evils. “You’ve chosen to favor one evil over another,” says the game ominously, which rubs salt into the wound when I’ve made a few regrettable decisions.
But the fun is that you can’t reverse these choices and must simply live with your mistakes. Besides, it’s these occasional poor judgments that adds dimension to Queen Meve, who would otherwise be a flawless character. Regardless, the writing does a good job of supporting your decisions while still showing the unpleasant consequences.
A nice touch to character development in Thronebreaker is the Mess Hall. It’s a tent in your base camp where you can chat with party members. New conversations appear along the way, though sadly not as many as I’d love to witness, because they were well-written. Chats with a certain gnome were particularly funny.
Now, on to the card elements. It’s taken me awhile to get there because, really, what makes Thronebreaker (and The Witcher) stellar is that, on top of decent gameplay, it’s defined by meaningful and often tragic stories, in which players have a hand in making.
Not the Gwent You Used to Know
The bulk of game time is still spent on card battles and puzzles. But this isn’t quite the Gwent you may be used to.
Gwent in Witcher 3 was pretty simple: Before entering a Gwent battle, you could decide which of five decks to play—corresponding to different races or factions. You tried to win the best of three rounds against an opponent. Victory was determined by whose cards had the highest total score. Each turn, you played a single card. These were usually numbered cards (units in your army). Several cards had special abilities, such as Weather cards that could affect an entire row of units. Cards were placed on either the melee, ranged, or siege row. Instead of playing a card, you could choose to pass and save up cards for the next round.
Battles in Thronebreaker, however, are more complex because the cards themselves are more complex and varied. It took me awhile to get used to the new, unfamiliar cards.
Your deck in Thronebreaker is composed almost entirely of humans, though I won’t say from which factions because this is directly connected to the plot. You also have cards that aren’t people but are war machines, traps, magical trinkets, and banners. Naturally, these come with special abilities.
You no longer choose between the faction decks of traditional Gwent, but simply tweak your sole deck by adding or removing cards. Another crucial difference in Thronebreaker: not all battles are best-of-three. Many are “shortened battles” that last only one round, which I was grateful for, wanting to get on with the story.
There was one silly thing I encountered in battles. If you play a unit that deals damage when deployed (say, the crossbow-wielding Arbalest) but has no enemies in sight, you are forced to damage one of your own units. Utter nonsense.
A Puzzle Game, Too
Apart from card battles, there are card puzzles. Puzzles operate by unique rules, at times nothing like Gwent or the usual Thronebreaker battles. They often deal you a preset hand of cards you must learn to work with.
I was surprised by how much of the game consisted of puzzles. They’re abundant in the game’s first half, perhaps to help players learn the ropes of an unfamiliar deck.
I enjoyed the puzzles much more than regular battles. They were always fresh and interesting, while battles were boringly easy from midgame onwards, after I accumulated a library of powerful cards.
Only two or three puzzles were stupidly easy and gave no satisfaction. Most posed a decent, manageable challenge. Several puzzles had me trying over 10 times before I solved them. And only two puzzles sent me crying to the Internet for help. So that’s a rather balanced spread, in terms of difficulty.
Final Words
Thronebreaker promises over 30 hours of content, very meaty for a humble mini-game that’s morphed into a full title. And it’s more than a mere card game. The stellar writing and voice-acting, on top of the tough moral choices, make an otherwise niche game worthy of attention beyond Witcher fans and Gwent players, though gameplay-wise it wouldn’t appeal to a wide audience.
I spent 38 hours on this game, completing 36 battles and 36 puzzles. I enjoyed the puzzles but found battles plain boring and a waste of time from mid-game onwards. I don’t know if playing on a harder difficulty would improve the experience of standard three-round battles. If battles were harder and I wanted to play all of them, Thronebreaker might outstay its welcome. Thankfully, they’re all skippable on the easiest difficulty, which allows you to simply enjoy the story.
I meant to buy Thronebreaker for the Nintendo Switch, but a nice deal on Steam swayed me to the PC version. Comparing the mouse against controller, I found it just as easy to use a controller for this game. So, controls-wise, I expect the Switch port to be a comfortable experience as well.
Finally, a parental note: The age rating is US Teen and UK 12+ because of the brutality portrayed in war (and generally pervasive in the Witcher games). But blood is hardly shown and only in faded colors; visually depicted gore is non-existent. There are a few images of corpses hanging from trees, but that’s as scary as it gets. The monsters were less grotesque-looking than in The Witcher 3, but a younger child may still find them scary. As someone who loved Witcher 3 and Gwent but detested the ugly monsters and gore, I was thrilled that Thronebreaker was heavily toned down in those areas.
Verdict: I Like It A Lot
