Thronebreaker: Review The Witcher Tales: Come for the Gwent, stay for the amazingly good story

In typical Witcher fashion, these choices are infernal. Whenever you make a decision, a Telltale style note appears in the lower left corner: "You chose one wrong in favor of another." No matter what choice you make, it's always the wrong choice, and this notification always appears.

For example, you will attend a wedding very early with a surprise ending: the bride is kidnapped by bandits and taken away. The city begs you, Please go find her and save her. Meve staggers with his army, catches bandits a little further east and launches into battle (via Gwent of course). This group of armed thugs is dead, you talk to the bride and … she does not want to go back. She arranged all the abduction to try to extricate herself from a forced marriage. What to do? Do you send it back and pocket the reward if necessary, or let it go?

And it's a relatively unambitious choice. Others become even more morally gray. Later, you try to seek the support of a foreign king to repel Nilfgaard's advances, but you discover that some of your soldiers stole it de facto. Do you forgive the soldiers you desperately need for the war? Even if it involves risking the anger of this king or losing his support?

There is no well decision, just the decision you make.

Your choices are also taken into account in the card game. Soldiers to whom you have access, including named characters, vary during the game based on Meve's actions. Black Rayla, an imposing warrior who allows you to draw any card from your deck and play it, is also a central character hating Scoi'atel, the nonhuman rebel of The witcherThe world of Eliminate all Scoi'atel that you find and she will remain happy. Refuse, and she could leave your army and leave your deck, depriving you of that power.

Not that matters a lot. Yes Tronebreaker Gwent is incredibly easy, at least the single-player version. It's even easier in Tronebreaker that he was in The witcher 3. Instead of the old three lines per side, there are only two lines left. In appearance, these are "melee" and "remote" characters, but in practice, you can play any card on any line.

The standard three-round fights are the weakest part of the game. You draw new cards after each turn and you have a maximum of 10 cards in your hand. So the old Witcher 3 strategy of "Make your opponent squander their good cards in the first round, then throw it" no longer works. Instead, you just fight until the first turn, until your opponent passes, where you will usually have a significant lead, and then you will step back anyway for the second round.

IDG / Hayden Dingman

It's useless. The best option, and Tronebreaker opts for this in most cases, is an "abbreviated battle" only lasts one round. You get your 10 cards and then you play your shots until exhaustion. It flows better, although it is still easy enough to win. Tronebreaker is full of combinations of powerful cards. Remember Black Rayla and his power "Draw and card of your deck"? Another character, Xavier, allows you to charge two people – allowing Black Rayla to draw Three maps of your bridge at will. Then you can use the lure card to put Xavier back in your hand, play it again, and give Rayla two other charges .

This means that in the end Black Rayla will have played five additional cards from your deck, all the cards of your choice. It's a completely broken combination and I won most of the battles in Tronebreaker more than 100 points. A particularly egregious battle, I won 323 to 0.

It does not matter much. This is, after all, a one player game. There is no real need for the fight to be balanced. But this makes the game a little slow, especially the classic three-round battles. You find a tactic and then you operate it again and again. Card games are fun (at least for me) when developing a strategy, not when you know exactly which cards you will play, which turn of play even before the match begins.

And if the best part of Tronebreaker The "puzzles". There are about twenty throughout the game and they change the rules of Gwent according to each situation. You have a custom hand, usually a custom win condition, and a limited number of rounds.

IDG / Hayden Dingman

The facilities are fantastic. You are involved in a drinking game against a dwarf, trying to build how many sips of beer you can take each turn. Another begins with your soldiers doing a snowball battle, when a troll joins them and starts throwing rocks.

To solve this puzzle, you must play your cards in the correct order, manipulating Gwent's rules to avoid certain pitfalls. This snowball puzzle, for example, the troll targets the row containing the most characters. Protecting Meve from danger therefore involves using the ability of another card that, once played, allows you to move three characters on the opposite row, attracting the troll's attention.

These are intelligent and satisfying puzzles to solve, which requires you to think about how different cards work together. It's a central part of every card game and every battle of Gwent, of course, but these mechanisms rarely have the same goal. TronebreakerPuzzles. This is the highlight of a fairly simple card game.

IDG / Hayden Dingman

Not that easy. I took pleasure in making my way through the world of Meve, especially in the light of the forces of history. I do not want to ruin end-of-game events, but the story develops a real emotional weight very early, and Tronebreaker ultimately provides an interesting window onto a world that was at least dominated by Geralt's worldview. That's no Witcher 3but it's a decent little parallel story, interrupted from time to time by a few battles of light cards.

Bottom line

It's a very good combo, as I said. The stimulation lags a bit in the middle, and I wish Gwent was a bit more complicated – even the three-row version of Witcher 3, with his melee / ranged / artillery restrictions, seemed to have more depth. But it's a card game with a real story and it's tempting.

I've always liked the idea of something like home or even, in the old days, Magic: the rally. I loved the little bits of flavor text, the window on this world where monsters were arguing over and over – but my enthusiasm has always diminished in the long run. Tronebreaker It's about twenty hours of mechanisms related to extrinsic motivation, a story that suits his world and his characters, even though it never reaches the same emotional depths The witcher 3 correct.