The Game:
For those of you who have played Gwent already you already have a great idea what this game is. Think of what you knew in The Witcher with a lot more complexity. For everybody else, Gwent is a card game born in the world of The Witcher. The game is played in three round and was designed to simulate a battle. A round is won by having more points then your opponent.You will pick one of several faction to play, each having their own playing style. Each faction has a hero card that you will unlock a special ability so building your deck around it is important. Your deck can be anywhere from 25 to 40 cards deep and can be filled with the maximum of 4 gold cards, and 6 silver cards.
At the beginning of each game you will draw 10 card from your deck. Cards are either spells, creatures, or abilities. Creatures have a number located on the top left of the card, which indicate the power, there is also a symbol under that indicating what slot you can put them in along with their faction banner. The Gwent board comes with 3 sections, melee, ranged, and siege. The player will play their cards to maximize their score while taking away from their enemies through damage or spells. Unless you have an ability you do not get to redraw more then a few cards per round so keeping track of what is left in your hand is important.
This stand alone version of Gwent comes with a story mode, a PvP mode, and of course your deck builder mode. The game lets you purchase with in game currency and real money items called barrels, which contain cards. You can also buy meteorite powder for transmuting cards with real money. You can also scrap cards and used the scraps to build other cards. Right now they also have a starter pack for 5 bucks that will land you a rare, several barrels, and some meteorite dust.
My Thoughts:
I was a huge fan of Gwent in The Witcher game so I was excited to see what they would be able to do with a stand alone version. So far so good. I am not hugely invested right now but the game has me picking up a round now and then. It is a nice break from what seems to be the copy cat manner of a lot of card games out there. In this card game you are not actually attacking a player so that dynamic is changed along with the three rows. It's different enough to stand out and I think adds a complexity to a genre that needed some.One thing for sure is this game is already super deep. There are so many abilities and the fact that that every card from the original game has been tweaked is a little overwhelming. One of the nice things in The Witcher is you were slowly brought into the game and all it could be. You slowly found new cards and started to encounter harder and harder enemies with new mechanics. In the stand alone version you are dumped in it all at once and it can quite overwhelming. In fact this is my biggest fear for the game. It will need a player base to survive but they might become intimidated by just how complex this game is. Hopefully they continue to expand the solo missions in order to let them ease into it.
The art work is great to. One of my favorite things about The Witcher 3 was the scrolling artwork you would see in the loading screens or cut scenes. This is translated well into the stand alone game and I have enjoyed sifting through the cards to see it all. For some cards the art work is not stagnate, giving the images in the cards some life.
Do not be mistaken this is a freemium game. This will give advantage to players with money from the very start but you really can't buy anything that can't eventually be earned by the free to play player. They will have to work longer to catch up but they can catch up and since barrels can be bought with in game currency, a dedicated player shouldn't have too much trouble. In fact one of the cool features about this game that will help in your deck building is when you open a barrel you get 4 cards picked for you and then you get to select 1 of 3. The UI indicate above it how many copies you own so you don't have to worry about choosing something you have.
With the games being decently paced and the decks being all over the place, I see this game having a long life on my PC. In fact with the rat race and money pit that Hearthstone became it's nice to have something fresh and compelling to play. There is a decent size community behind it so I have not had to wait too long for any match.
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