Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

I love The Witcher series, so this game was a must for me (I am from Poland, duh). The story is really great, animations and voice acting (I played the Polish version) are top notch. The game creates a nice balance by introducing shorter fights (one round only) and puzzles (pre-defined custom deck/hand and a specific situation to solve) - this way you don't get bored by playing the same deck over and over. The satisfaction from winning those Gwent matches is high. It could be a perfect score, but there are undeniable flaws: 1. Difficulty - I always like to play on the hardest difficulty. That's what I did here, but I discovered it's very badly designed. I have no problem with lowering the power of my cards (on normal it's +2, on easy it's +4) - that is actually the proper way of balancing difficulty. But the drastic reduction in loot and resources (comparing to some guides, it seemed some rewards are cut 10 times!) gained from quests is absurd. You can barely afford one path of units (either Gascon or Raynard) and have no money to build other utility buildings. It even makes some of the quests nonsense, e.g. you can deposit your money into a bank to earn some interest later. On normal, if you deposit 2500 gold, you get 5000 back - sensible. But on hard, you get 1500 back, which makes the whole quest nonsense. You also cannot really experiment with your deck, you rather need to have a single plan for your deck and stick to it for the whole campaign, because you won't have the resources to craft cards which you later don't use. 2. Achievements - either badly designed or just incompatible with the difficulty system. The achievements should reward players who play on the highest difficulty - they should bring challenges. In this case you are actually encouraged to play on the easiest one - because there you will have plenty of resources, so no problems with building/upgrading all the buildings. There is not a single achievement that would require you to play on hard. ALSO, you won't get 100% achis if you don't use guides to check the outcome of your choices. I wanted to play legit and not use any guides - I even managed to get over the loss of Eyck (I needed to start a 2nd playthrough to get him), but after losing another strong companion I was just mad and decided to check every decision outcome till the end of the game. Same with the weapons - you will surely miss at least one if you don't use guides. 3. The recruits system - I don't know if the developers had a different design for it and changed it because it was too hard or something, but this system basically makes no sense. It seems to represent the size of Meve's army - the values get decreased in story-wise hard fights with big losses and get increased by recruit points on the map or when some non-hero folks join you. But it has no actual impact on the gameplay or fights. You only need those recruits when you want to craft new unit cards. It would maybe be nice to introduce mechanics where, when your unit dies during some fight, you later need to "resupply" the card with new manpower (no gold or wood needed, but the card goes inactive until you assign new recruits to it). That would be similar to losing a portion of your army in games like HoMM. 4. The cards' descriptions - I am not sure if that is an issue in Polish translation or a global problem, but some cards have either wrong or imprecise descriptions. When a card says "create", it sometimes means create and put in your hand, sometimes create and immediately play - for strategic reasons it makes a huge difference, but you won't know until you just test a card in a fight. My overall score is 7/10. I still strongly recommend this game, especially to all who like The Witcher series and/or Gwent, but I have some advice: - if you're a casual player and you don't care about achievements - just play on the easiest difficulty and enjoy the story - if you're a completionist (like me) - use a guide to check the outcomes of your decisions, so you don't lose a strong card and you don't block yourself from obtaining a weapon for Meve - and play on normal difficulty - this way you are able to get all achis the legit way and you are not stupidly blocked with upgrades.