Gwent: Rogue Mage Review in Progress

ign.com:

I never took much time out of my Witchering career to play the head-to-head card game Gwent in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, but the Gwent-based single-player RPG Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales was one of my favorite games in the entire Witcher franchise. And likewise, the new standalone spin-off Gwent: Rogue Mage has gotten its hooks into me with its roguelike elements, tricky boss battles, and lightweight but intriguing story. I haven’t quite reached the end of that story just yet, but I have completed plenty of runs and am excited to see how it’s truly meant to end even after around 25 hours.

If you never played Thonebreaker, both it and Rogue Mage basically use Gwent as an RPG battle system, fighting against AI enemies and giving you some cards that would be hilariously unbalanced in its PvP counterpart. See, part of why I've always found standard Gwent a bit lackluster is that there are a handful of meta strategies that are very powerful, and putting together a deck with no restrictions can be tedious and intimidating. Thronebreaker and Rogue Mage work so well because their deck building restrictions, weird cards, and unorthodox match rules actually make them significantly more fun.

"It’s much quicker to list the few things Thronebreaker gets wrong than the many, many things it does delightfully well. Aside from being one of the best-written RPGs I’ve played in years, the varied ways it keeps its card-based combat from stagnating across a 40ish-hour campaign are admirably clever and well thought-out. Deck building and some light RPG elements that allow upgrading specific cards give a feeling of progression to your two-dimensional army, and expertly crafted companions that aren’t shy about leaving you out in the cold