I just finished B&W. Overall, I really liked it. I do think there are some flaws--which I will mention below--but it is extremely good overall.
First, the pros:
- Toussaint itself is one of the most beautiful areas I've ever seen in a video game. It really is a work of art. Skellige is pretty. Novigrad is a well-done city. And Velen is atmospheric, though it is purposely not really beautiful. But Toussaint is on a completely different level in terms of beauty and art work, in my opinion (I fully recognize others might very well prefer other environments in the game, though).
- And, for a DLC, B&W is absolutely enormous. This truly could have been a standalone game. There's a lot of content and the content is good.
- I also thought it added some very interesting character build options. Specifically, mutations are a nice addition. Yes, some are pretty OP, but they're fun. Grandmaster set bonuses are cool too. And extra skill slots are nice. B&W undoubtedly was better in terms of character build options than Hearts of Stone was, as that only had the runewords, which weren't all that consequential.
Now for the cons:
- In terms of story and emotional impact, it's not bad (in fact, by the standards of other games, it's absolutely great), but there are stories with more emotional impact in the main game and HoS. While the two antagonists did have interesting and human motivations, I think the emotion of the story was a bit dulled by the fact that they both just seemed to be act petulantly. To be clear, I still liked the story and think it would hold up well against virtually any other game in the genre. But it wasn't CDPR's very best work in this regard.
- I think the voice acting was a bit of a step down from the rest of the game. It often felt a bit cheesy, with voice actors trying to have some sort of French accent but just sounding odd. In the context of this DLC--which was clearly meant to be a more light-hearted fare than the rest of the game--this is more forgiveable. It's sort of part of the atmosphere of Toussaint. But I still think it was a relative weakness.
- I found it disappointing that there was no romance option. Yes, there's a potential sex scene with a female character. And yes, the ending can be romantic. But there's not really a real romance. This seems like an odd choice to me, especially given the setting. In any event, I guess I'm mostly thinking about this because I played B&W directly after HoS, and I thought the Shani romance was very well done. It's actually a testament to CDPR's ability to do romance that I was disappointed by the lack of it here; I'm not one to usually care about video game romances, since they're usually just not very well done.
- This is a matter of opinion, but I didn't love the soundtrack for B&W as much as I did the soundtrack for the main game. This is truly a category that is all relative. I liked B&W's soundtrack; I just liked a lot of the music from the main game even more. There are probably plenty of people who disagree with me on this, since music preferences are clearly subjective.