Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales – Review (Switch)
With the sudden resurgence of The Witcher series, the timing of CD Projekt RED’s latest re-release on the Nintendo Switch is nothing short of impeccable. Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales fleshes out the card playing experience of Gwent in a fully realized story driven adventure. Sacrificing the sword wielding action and RPG mechanics for a more thoughtful and strategic approach to combat could have the potential to deter some. Luckily, Thronebreaker manages to make the strategy of Gwent accessible, rewarding, and perfectly complimented by an engrossing cast of memorable characters. Despite some technical restrictions presented by the Switch, the ‘jump in and out’ gameplay of Gwent make this spin off right at home on the mobile console.
While the story set up of Thronebreaker is somewhat derivative, the sum of its parts come together to provide a surprisingly meaty tale of revenge. A queen is exiled from her kingdom after a double crossing by a once trusted ally. On the run, Queen Meve travels the land to assemble an unlikely band of allies to take back her Kingdom of Lyria and Rivia. It isn’t especially original. However, an immensely deep and interesting set of supporting characters, stellar voice acting, and the backing of the mystical lore of The Witcher series help to create a satisfying journey. While this could easily be seen as a side project for CD Projekt RED, it doesn’t take long to realize that the same care in detail and production value was put into this seemingly smaller entry in The Witcher series as the other headline titles from the acclaimed Polish developer.
The primary game play loop of Thronebreaker involves playing out the story in Gwent battles puzzles, traversing the over world and managing your camp. Moving through the various regions of Rivia and Lyria takes place on a beautiful hand drawn and cell shaded map from an isometric perspective. By slowly scouring that land, you can pillage for resources such as wood, gold, and enlisted soldiers. You’ll also encounter quest events that require you to choose branching dialogue options. Many of these involve deciding whether or not to help townsfolk deal with roaming monsters or the aftermath of invading Nilfgaardian forces. Often, players will need to decide between sacrificing scarce resources to aid the people, or ignore them to keep your coffers healthy. These choices often have major impacts and can result in NPCs living or dying, as well as influencing your army’s level of confidence in you.
While collecting resources and discovering secrets on the map doesn’t get old, it can get needlessly tricky, particularly on a smaller screen. The graphical style combined with your point of view can often make it difficult to see where you can and can’t go. I spent a considerable amount of time using trial and error to see if certain areas were even accessible. This issue is made worse when playing in hand held mode – where I spent most of my time playing the game. Traversal is always enjoyable, but this was a quirk that players will need to deal with, especially if you’re primarily playing on the go. Further to this, I experienced several hitches and severe drops in frame rate when moving through the over world map. This occurred on a regular basis in both docked and hand held modes.
Your encampment can be accessed anywhere from the over world. From here, you’ll spend gathered resources on new abilities, perks, and new cards for your Gwent deck. You can also spend time in your encampment managing your deck – swapping in new cards or just massaging your deck to fit your play style. The story is also fleshed out within the camp. A Mess Tent houses all of your companions with new ones being added as you progress through the story. Optional conversations can be had and effectively serve to shed light on their back story and how they came to be a part of your army.
Exploration and resource management aside, the party piece of Thronebreaker are Gwent battles. Anyone who has played most recently The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt will be immediately familiar with how the card game works. Even if you haven’t, the game does a great job in the early stages of providing a tutorial of how to manage your units strengths and weaknesses on the battlefield.
Where Thronebreaker elevates itself is how it expertly finds ways to add variety to each and every battle. In fact, calling them battles is somewhat underselling the experience. While standard three round battles are plentiful, there are also numerous puzzle encounters and special story battles. In puzzle showdowns, certain circumstances will be introduced that force you to change your approach. You may only have access to a certain set of cards – enough to overcome the challenge, but you’ll need to think critically and be creative to find the solution. In one instance, an encounter with a mage spawned two fire golems. These golems’ power levels made them impossible to defeat, but by killing the much weaker mage, you will be victorious. Other story battles may limit the encounter to a single round with specialized units on the play surface and a boss like enemy who must be dealt with. It was always exciting to see what unique parameters would be introduced in each encounter, and how these will influence the players approach to victory.
The visuals within battles are also particularity impressive. Most unit cards are animated and treat the player to a bite sized cut scene that reflects the personality of that card. One favorite was Gaston – The Duke of Dogs. This character is somewhat of a cross roads between a jester and a mercenary. This is perfectly captured in his card animation which features him sat with his legs kicked up and laughing hysterically. Your most noble of companions, Lieutenant Reynard’s card exudes his dignity and respect as he inspects that front line soldiers standing at the ready. I didn’t need this added detail of animations within cards, but it adds an amazing level of charisma and charm to each and every card. It does however need to be noted that the same frame rate issues that occur in the over world are also present in battles. This is particularly noticeable when status effects such as fog or fire are present in the play area.
Recommendation: While the Nintendo Switch does, at times, struggle to handle Thronebreaker, its pick up and play accessibility make it perfectly suited for the on-the-go console. Technical constraints and sometimes cumbersome ‘smaller screen’ over world design aside, this is one that is easy to recommend. Prerequisite knowledge of series lore or experience with previous entries isn’t necessary. Even if you weren’t the biggest fan of Gwent from previous Witcher titles, this is worth checking out for its strong characters, gorgeous visuals and satisfying strategy mechanics.
Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales released on Nintendo Switch on January 28, 2020.
A digital code for the Nintendo Switch was provided by the publisher, but this fact did not affect the reviewer’s opinion.
