1.3 hours played
Written 5 days ago
(Regarding my game time: I originally played through this game twice with 100% completion on PS3, and did a playthrough of the dlc campaign and initial chapters on PC.)
This is a game held up primarily by its superb story and interesting exploration. The journey of Mors and Alester is a top-notch adventure that has a great variety of locales familiar to ASOIAF fans and Mass Effect style choice and consequence-focused events that kept me enjoying the game start to absolute finish. The very visible constraints of the game’s small budget rear their head throughout with wildly varying qualities of voice acting, asset reuse, and visuals dated even for its time, but the strength of the game’s story coupled with consistently interesting quests keep everything enjoyable. There’s a good balance between wide city and town areas filled with side quests and optional secret treasures to linear setpieces focused on combat encounters and dialogue choices. The story of the game is among the best of ASOIAF (not a high bar after the last half of GoT and the hot mess of its prequel, I know) with great characters and a constantly shifting plot that covers a lot more of human drama and the mystical side of the world than political intrigue.
The often-repeated line on this game is “great story, bad gameplay”, but I’m going to go against the grain here and say that the quality of gameplay you get with Game of Thrones is absolutely dependent on your engagement with it: if you want to focus on the story and don’t focus on your character build(s) with Mors/Alester you get an experience that is a serviceable button-masher where with enough spamming and potions you can get through any combat encounter without thinking too hard, while if you take the time to engage with it you get essentially a deeper but clunkier version of Dragon Age: Origins. There’s an interesting system of character specializations that are both unique to each player character, with the lithe Red Priest Alester getting variations of DPS and buffer/debuffer, while the imposing ranger Mors gets AOE and single-target damage specializations. This, coupled with an advantages and disadvantages system that has the player select weaknesses to damage types or stat reductions in exchange for boosts to stats, gives a lot more variety to the game and makes playing as Mors and Alester feel substantially different. I would advise players to consult gameplay and build guides prior when creating their specialization, as the player is asked to decide game-defining choices like if they want to be deathly allergic to poison before they even get to control their character or know how prevalent or non-prevalent poisoned weapons are in the game’s combat.
Game of Thrones 2012 is one of those games you find at the bargain bin and take a chance on, only to be absolutely surprised at the quality of what you’re playing. Many times with those types of games I get the unfulfilled feeling “if only they could have had more ambition/mechanics/budget” that looms over the whole experience. But with this game instead I was astounded what they were able to deliver: ASOIAF has always been treated as a cash cow that can be exploited with the bare minimum of care done for original story in favor of relying on GRRM’s imported writing and world building to do the work for them, but Cyanide put in the work to create a new experience that fits into the world and delivers far beyond what most studios in its place would have.
