A good story and setting trapped in a terrible card game.
It makes a good use of its setting. Has a great main character, it's well written even putting in world details or the inner thoughts of character for every minor battles, very nice artwork in the environment, in the cutscenes, and for some of the cards. The framing of the game is a guy telling a story and everything that happens is either narrated by him or voiced by the game's characters, all with well done voice work. There are important and difficult decisions throughout the game that can change what cards you get and what named allies follow you, with characters have dialogue in and out of battles and can help in random events, there are some weak elements to decision making as your army morale never really matters but choice can come back to help or hinder you long after you make them and the game only keeps one save file automatically updated.
So why did it take two years to finish? Because, Gwent is a terrible card game and the battles tend to be so easy that the problem is more the length of the game forcing you to play such a large slow number of dull encounters in between nearly every good story moment. It would be difficult to explain why for people not at all familiar with it. It was a passable distraction in The Witcher 3 with an interesting element of leaders getting use of a one use battle order that could change the field up, weather effects, and having to place units in melee, ranged, and support areas which was hurt due to overpowered character cards you could keep adding to your deck and with the game only being a side focus. So of course, when they go to make Gwent an official game weather is basically removed, leader abilities are done frequently, and the melee and ranged rows now do nothing except for effect a very small handful of the game's cards.
For the majority of the game (all but the final battle) I used roughly the exact same deck, only adding in a few hero cards from the characters I kept with me. I made no use of spending the gold, recruits, and wood you gather to create new cards until I realized that there were achievements for having all of them in the last chapter of the game. This does hurt the decisions and narrative a bit as you end up swimming in money and wood by the last two chapters of the game. Do you help the peasants? Well that will cost a small fortune of 1,000 gold. Good thing I have 60,000. The game is so mindlessly easy that I just never cared to exploit any of the ridiculous strategies you can make use of. Gwent is a game where you could pull off bullshit like this if you construct an annoying enough deck with hero, relic, and main cards that interact with each other enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBIsZlV1jHk
Your choices effecting who joins you and if they ever decide to leave you (not counting ones who always will leave you) is obviously perfectly fine in a normal game and how it works is handled well here, but when those characters also act as cards that you might create entire strategies around you have a developer that clearly doesn't know what they are doing. Nonsensical siege battles when you have to take forts or towns are frequently said that they will be costly battles but never matter in terms of story, only gaining you resources, and the fortification walls that block the entire melee row for the enemy side, only hurt them as they limit where they can play cards and for some reason provide them no benefits. As my deck always used guys that could set a row on fire to deal out damage to ever character on it each turn, limiting the defenders to one row is certainly not helping them.
The game's final main battle resorts to doing what all games like this do, just blatantly cheating with two massively overpowered leader abilities and overpowered cards in their deck. Luckily the AI is nonexistent when it comes to actually using card abilities so I built a deck (really for the first time in a 30 hour game) that gets stronger as characters take low amounts of damage and gets much stronger when characters are killed and the AI used the 10+ turns they had on me after I could no longer do anything to keep constantly attacking me (on average doing about 10 damage to my side, and then gaining me 20-40 additional strength from the game each time). ...And I still barely won. Good thing I made the story decisions that got me and allowed me to keep all those cards I needed.
The game is full of optional puzzle battles in a game that doesn't really function as a puzzle style card game, so these are frequently throwing you into situations where cards do completely different things that you need to try to learn for a brief extra event or they might have the puzzles just play like different card games (Hearthstone or even one that is just a flip over pair matching card game).
I still kind of recommend it. It's an enjoyable narrative with some good events to interact with and a good use of The Witcher's setting. But if you've playing any kind of remotely good card games, Gwent is just terrible by comparison. Even dull simplistic things like Hearthstone are better.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1248524673249234944
It makes a good use of its setting. Has a great main character, it's well written even putting in world details or the inner thoughts of character for every minor battles, very nice artwork in the environment, in the cutscenes, and for some of the cards. The framing of the game is a guy telling a story and everything that happens is either narrated by him or voiced by the game's characters, all with well done voice work. There are important and difficult decisions throughout the game that can change what cards you get and what named allies follow you, with characters have dialogue in and out of battles and can help in random events, there are some weak elements to decision making as your army morale never really matters but choice can come back to help or hinder you long after you make them and the game only keeps one save file automatically updated.
So why did it take two years to finish? Because, Gwent is a terrible card game and the battles tend to be so easy that the problem is more the length of the game forcing you to play such a large slow number of dull encounters in between nearly every good story moment. It would be difficult to explain why for people not at all familiar with it. It was a passable distraction in The Witcher 3 with an interesting element of leaders getting use of a one use battle order that could change the field up, weather effects, and having to place units in melee, ranged, and support areas which was hurt due to overpowered character cards you could keep adding to your deck and with the game only being a side focus. So of course, when they go to make Gwent an official game weather is basically removed, leader abilities are done frequently, and the melee and ranged rows now do nothing except for effect a very small handful of the game's cards.
For the majority of the game (all but the final battle) I used roughly the exact same deck, only adding in a few hero cards from the characters I kept with me. I made no use of spending the gold, recruits, and wood you gather to create new cards until I realized that there were achievements for having all of them in the last chapter of the game. This does hurt the decisions and narrative a bit as you end up swimming in money and wood by the last two chapters of the game. Do you help the peasants? Well that will cost a small fortune of 1,000 gold. Good thing I have 60,000. The game is so mindlessly easy that I just never cared to exploit any of the ridiculous strategies you can make use of. Gwent is a game where you could pull off bullshit like this if you construct an annoying enough deck with hero, relic, and main cards that interact with each other enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBIsZlV1jHk
Your choices effecting who joins you and if they ever decide to leave you (not counting ones who always will leave you) is obviously perfectly fine in a normal game and how it works is handled well here, but when those characters also act as cards that you might create entire strategies around you have a developer that clearly doesn't know what they are doing. Nonsensical siege battles when you have to take forts or towns are frequently said that they will be costly battles but never matter in terms of story, only gaining you resources, and the fortification walls that block the entire melee row for the enemy side, only hurt them as they limit where they can play cards and for some reason provide them no benefits. As my deck always used guys that could set a row on fire to deal out damage to ever character on it each turn, limiting the defenders to one row is certainly not helping them.
The game's final main battle resorts to doing what all games like this do, just blatantly cheating with two massively overpowered leader abilities and overpowered cards in their deck. Luckily the AI is nonexistent when it comes to actually using card abilities so I built a deck (really for the first time in a 30 hour game) that gets stronger as characters take low amounts of damage and gets much stronger when characters are killed and the AI used the 10+ turns they had on me after I could no longer do anything to keep constantly attacking me (on average doing about 10 damage to my side, and then gaining me 20-40 additional strength from the game each time). ...And I still barely won. Good thing I made the story decisions that got me and allowed me to keep all those cards I needed.
The game is full of optional puzzle battles in a game that doesn't really function as a puzzle style card game, so these are frequently throwing you into situations where cards do completely different things that you need to try to learn for a brief extra event or they might have the puzzles just play like different card games (Hearthstone or even one that is just a flip over pair matching card game).
I still kind of recommend it. It's an enjoyable narrative with some good events to interact with and a good use of The Witcher's setting. But if you've playing any kind of remotely good card games, Gwent is just terrible by comparison. Even dull simplistic things like Hearthstone are better.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1248524673249234944