Game Of Thrones review

As characters throughout the A Song Of Ice And Fire novels periodically intone, “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.”  This pithy reduction of George RR Martin’s unfinished fiction doubles as the tagline to its TV adaptation, which has now romped to the conclusion of its second season, but on both screen and paper it’s a dichotomy that conceals a multitude of means. Not so in its videogame form, in which a new side plot is delivered via a seldom-branching corridor of skirmishes, lined with cursory gestures towards RPG convention.

It’s not a wholesale betrayal of the source material – the plot alternates between two world-worn, deeply imperfect characters in much the same way as the books flit between grimly human perspectives; it treats the canon gently; and it cleverly snuggles its central conspiracy into an intrigue that prefaces the events familiar to fans. However, its action doesn’t articulate the varied nature of the fiction, in which beleaguered, multifaceted characters wrestle with irreconcilable matters of the state, spin sedition, and wage tragic, ruinous military campaigns across continents. There’s a great game to be made of this, but it’s one that’s necessarily more ambitious than a combat-heavy RPG with cursory dialogue-tree vignettes.

The case for such a limited palette is not aided by the implementation, either. Production standards are gruesome: the game’s cast of uncanny visual caricatures are made of bleary pixels on top of low-poly models, and the rousing vistas of Westeros imagined by readers will be unrecognisable in these claustrophobic castle complexes and dismal woodland warrens. There’s no convincing world here – even its largest hubs offer little enticement to explore, since each part is much the same as another, concealing few secrets worth uncovering and hedged by invisible walls.

The voice acting, meanwhile, threatens to unseat Two Worlds as the master of slipshod dialogue. The few members of the TV cast who deign to appear sound like they’re under heavy sedation, and the script can’t manage to match Martin’s (admittedly erratic) quality.

At the game’s centre is an intricate but extremely flawed combat system. It’s built around the familiar RPG conceit of queuing skills, achieved via hotkeys on PC and a skill wheel on consoles. Accessing this slows down time, allowing you to flit between characters in your party and develop a semblance of tactics before the first blow arcs down. Yet everything works to conceal the system’s promise. Menus are arrayed with no concession to intuition, while the thrash of limbs onscreen is hard to parse (not least because the points at which animations conclude, skill activations complete and damage is dealt appear to be out of sync). The camera often barely frames this mayhem, and frequently sneaks off behind the scenery to hide. 

The skills themselves have potent tactical implications, and are at their most effective when used in combination. Floor one opponent, and an ally can deliver a hammer blow that deals more damage to prone enemies. But such moments are awkward to attain. Timing attacks among your team is a painful fudge, and often sabotaged by clipping issues or targeting glitches.

Worse still, any tactical decision finds itself jammed in the bottleneck of your energy reserves. Each attack skill gobbles a huge chunk of your energy bar, and the ability to replenish it has such a large (and apparently invisible) cooldown that you can rarely do so more than once per battle. You can also quaff potions to help, but only if you’ve been able to buy them, which is rare. The result is regular thumb twiddling while you wait for the bar to slowly refill, unable to exert meaningful control.

In some ways, this chaos of thwarted intentions and clumsy flailing matches the mayhem of an actual melee, but it makes for an awkward, aggravating tactical challenge. This is a shame, because once you develop a feel for the combat’s rhythm and structure you’re occasionally gifted glimpses into its depths, such as groups of enemies that present particular challenges, or new skills that you can chain together to deadly effect. 

The two lead characters also offer gratifyingly divergent styles of play. Our take on Mors Westford, a grizzled member of the Night’s Watch, is a dervish who specialises in dual wielding axes. He comes with a spectacularly unlikely looking dog, which you can deploy to disrupt enemy attacks, knock people down and get stuck in scenery. For Alester Sarwyck, a prodigal son and priest of the god of flame, we opted for the Water Dancer class. This makes him a swordsman of considerable agility, reliant on dodging, parrying and setting enemies on fire – although the latter is restricted by your meagre supplies of flammable gloop.

Both these characters offer intrigue, and make gratifyingly unusual protagonists. The events that entwine them (family feuds, civil unrest, and betrayal) proceed at a pace, too. But each tempting theme boils down to the meanest handful of dialogue decisions and a lengthy sequence of combat encounters.

It’s to the game’s credit that there’s even a sense of missed opportunity here; many tie-ins do less than hint at what might have been. With its ultimately elusive tactical possibilities and well-intentioned stab at conspiracy, Game Of Thrones has attempted to establish depth in areas ignored by more polished endeavours. That it largely fails to deliver does not quite snuff out its allure – not, at least, for devotees of the fiction. For those yet to be tempted by Martin’s work, however, the blunderous combat, mangled dialoguing and profoundly unlovely looks will make it seem, as a Westerosi idiom goes, a mummer’s farce. [5]

Read the full review, including a post script article on whether a linear game is a faithful use of George RR Martin’s epic fiction, in issue 243 of Edge, out July 4. You can discuss the game and review in the comments section below, in the Edge forum, or on our Facebook and Google+ pages.