Game of Thrones is a role-playing game (RPG) based on the popular TV show of the same name. For fans of the series, especially those intimately familiar with the history of the Baratheon, Stark, Targaryen and Lannister families, this will be an awesome journey into Westeros.
The game focuses on two peripheral characters from the Game of Thrones universe - Mors Westford and Alester Sarwyck. Mors is a member of the Night's Watch, defending Westeros from evil beings from the other side of the Wall, while Alester is a nobleman who fled after Robert Baratheon's Rebellion years ago. However, players do fleetingly engage with a number of more well-known characters.
Unfortunately, the overall story is relatively boring and very generic. The dialogue is poor, the voice acting is awful, and the result is that Mors and Alester come off as one-dimensional and rather dull.
This is a typical class-based RPG: players customise their character, increase their skills and abilities as they progress, and choose weapons and armour that increase damage or defensive skills. The skill trees are large, and customising the character to the player's style of play can be very tough, but it's critical to their success in the game.
Combat is not completely real-time - when engaged with a baddie players queue up attacks and execute them in a turn-based manner with their opponent. The controls are relatively simple: pressing X adds a general attack to the queue and holding down the bumper slows down time and gives players the opportunity to add a special combat move.
Strangely, the combat system works well. Even though you feel more disconnected from real-time battle, queuing up the right sequence of attacks is a little more strategic and lot of fun. The one negative aspect is that there are a number of combinations that work really well and I found I tended to stick to what I know. The result is that combat eventually degenerates into very repetitive gameplay.
In a nutshell
Unfortunately, the game is not very polished. There are a number of frame rate issues that occur during combat that make it feel like the combat isn't very real, many of the side quests feel very superfluous to the story and the character animations, audio and music are rather poor.
Long sections of boring dialogue are punctuated by short stints of repetitive action - for almost 30 hours. While fans will love the foray into Westeros, the game is not good enough to stand up to some of the excellent RPGs released over the past 12 months.
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