Just finished 'Thronebreaker - A Witcher Tale' last night, and its 'okay.'
I've played Witcher3 six times. Twice on PC, twice on PS4, & twice after it was enhanced for modern consoles. And I've had the itch to play it again, but play a game for the 7th time? I'll play it before Witcher 4 comes out but not before.
So I reminded myself I haven't played through Thronebreaker, despite owning it on PC & SeriesX, so rather than get annoyed/frustrated on my previous attempts I played it on the easy difficulty that allowed to skip difficult battles. So throughout playing it I gave each battle 3 attempts before skipping them.
First, the shell-shaded art is great.
Second, the voice-acting is just as great as Witcher3's.
Third, the narration is perfect.
But that's as far as my praises go because everything else is bare-bones.
The card-battle gameplay is obviously based off of Witcher3's qwent, the greatest side-game in a game ever, but its a far dumber version of it.
Gwent has 3 rows you can play cards, and most cards are dedicated to a single row. In Thronebreaker, there's only 2 rows, and any card can be played on either row without an advantage/disadvantage to it.
I could go into more detail of the card-battle gameplay, but in short, a grave disappointment compared to any expectations of anyone who's played Witcher3's gwent when they heard CDPR released a Gwent-campaign game.
I will say this... you'd have expectations to be needed to upgrade your deck as symbolic of Meve's army as she grows it from a group of rag-tag bandits to large and well equiped to quell an entire invasion... but some of the standard cards you're given are the most powerful you'll have for the entire campaign.
Although it has 'Witcher' in the title, 98% of the game is Witcher-less. There's one battle with a random 'School of the Bear' Witcher... who disappears immediately after. And there's one battle with everyone's favorite Witcher, Geralt, and he too leaves immediately after. The game's story would have been drastically improved if there was at least one regular Witcher character involved throughout the story.
And the story is... okay.
Unfortunately due to the story's heavy narration lack of cut-scenes it suffers of 'Tell & Don't Show' when to grasp the scale of the war you need to 'Show & Don't Tell' your own forces against the forces of your enemies, be it be against monsters or armies.
Although I played it on Easy, I figured I'd play it on a higher difficulty after 'learning the ropes.' But I didn't see anything in the game that was worth replaying at a higher difficulty, and as best I could tell you're just not allowed to skip battles.... so you're forced to play annoying and agrovating card battles until you win them. No thank you.
And all variations of the game's ending you can simply watch on YouTube. No point in playing though a 36-hour long game just to see a few things different.
So my recommendation is to skip it... unless to avoid playing through Witcher3 a 7th time.