The general consensus is that, yes, it's a far more successful endeavor (both adaptation and actual game itself) than Dark Souls TBG. (Which was done by completely different company. albeit CMON already did a couple of years a BB Card Game before this, whiich I actually played)
I'll start with the positives - the game is overall pretty great. The mechanics are obviously very unique, and do a brilliant job as an adaptation to translate the "feelings" of the game, with the tension of aggroing enemies, anger of losing blood echoes, fear of getting one-shotted, without anything feeling "cheap" or unfair, anymore than the game did. It also icely translates and adapts that component, where you "learn" the game by trial and error - all I can say, don't expect to finish a campaign on the first attempt. But even with several retries, each one is diverse enough to keep things interesting, no grindiness here. There's actually no time to grind anything - each chapter, which is the main mission, with mandatory completion of, let's say, 2 out of 3 side missions, runs on a timer that respawns enemies along the way - and if it reaches the end and you fail to finish the main quest, restart the campaign from scratch. It seems polarizing, and it's hard to describe in words - but such a mechanic is necessary to maintain the tension, otherwise you could just respawn over and over. It also keeps the session's playtime within 60-90min. The justification of it is mentioned as the Paleblood/Blood Moon rising. Storywise, I'd say it's a remix to the original game, and is a nice interpretation of it.
Other than that, I don't feel very qualified as a "newbie" to compare it to other things, but the game seems to be 8/10 - very good, even great, but not a pinnacle of brilliance or "top 10 of all time) like Gloomhaven. The game is 1-4 players, and apparently is at its most challenging with 4, especially timewise. Solo is fine, but looks even more fun for 2 players, which looks like the sweet spot. So that's something to consider, I guess.
Now let's address the elephant in a room (literally!), of that 14kg/30lbs pile of boxes, because Core box aside, only 4 of those expansions are in retail (Chalice, Forbidden Woods, Cainhurst and Hunter's Dream). The rest are Kickstarter exclusives, with some extras on top included - CMON's business model is obviously preying on FOMO and kickstarting all of their games to amass boatloads of cash, where sky's the limit, and the passionate fanbase of From is very "milkable" (if you look closely, you can already see they will probably do it all over again for the Old Hunters DLC).
The pictures here speak for themselves:
Now, why is that kind of a big deal? First of all, a big part of the game's replayability are both the number of "Campaigns"(scenarios), as well as the hunter/trick weapon (it's your character that you're stuck with for a scenario), which play differently with their abilities and deckbuilding. Vanilla has 4, another retail xpac(Chalice) adds another 4, whereas the All-In has whopping 15 of them. While impossibly un-ergonomic, all of this piles up into having a game that's exponentially more diverse.
Second, mostly for fans of the vidya game like us men of culture here, the vanilla box is just the 1st act, with the rest locked behind expansions, with most of the 2nd and 3rd act KS exclusive. If you buy retail and don't know the videogame's story, but wish to learn more about its "Cthulhu-ness", you can go straight to the epilogue, or watch a youtube vid or something I guess.
I don't know about you, but if I were stuck with retail, I'd be pissed.
I actually got extremely lucky, as I was checking eBay etc every now and then, and found everything brand new sealed for 350 GBP (which is the original price adjusted for inflation, I guess?). Other than that, the current price seems to be 900-1000EU/USD for it. I guess if I get bored I can sell Byrgenwerth etc. for 150 EUR (seriously, I've checked).
Don't get me wrong, as for the game itself, the value and content in it is perfectly adequate, especially for someone who never played the PS4 game, etc.
As for the quality of the physical components, cards have a very nice texture to them and are solid (I still sleeve them - 1364 in total!!), the miniatures (plastic) are very well sculpted, with no cheapness, but the same can't be said of cardboard tiles sadly. They have to be shuffled and it immediately shows on the edges. I don't know how you can revolutionize cardboard, but for 4 mil amassed on KS I'd definitely do something differently. A lot of the pictures are originally fan-art, so I'm certain they saved there.
Also, while luck is very mitigated (there's no dice at all), once in a blue moon you can still get extremely unlucky and get shitty tiles, or "roll" in a shuffle the worst possible outcomes. Which actually happened to me just now, so I've ragequit and wrote this post instead