George R. R. Martin’s seminal fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, and subsequently its TV adaptation, HBO’s Game of Thrones, has always felt like a gaming franchise just waiting to happen. While we’ve had a few attempts at the IP in the gaming scene, notably with Telltale’s Game of Thrones series, these projects haven’t quite seen the level of success you would expect from such an otherwise gigantic franchise. Netmarble is the latest studio to attempt an adaptation with its own version – Game of Thrones Kingsroad. Ultimately, however, it turns out that the attempt has led to some mixed results.
“As for the combat itself, you get a simplistic combo system with your melee weapons depending on your combination of light and heavy attacks.”
Let’s get the basics out of the way. Game of Thrones Kingsroad is an action RPG that features a somewhat open world that slowly unlocks as you gradually progress through its main storyline. The central story revolves around the player character – a child of House Tyre – tasked with two key quests: rallying support for the Night’s Watch to tackle the growing threat of the White Walkers, and getting a letter to King’s Landing that officially marks the protagonist as an heir to House Tyre.
Fans of the show or books will recognise the time period of the game as well after the events of the Red Wedding. Most of the Northern parts of Westeros are essentially under the control of House Bolton – a family so cheerful and happy, their sigil is an upside down flayed man. Since the North’s war for independence was only recently brought to an abrupt end with the events of the Red Wedding (the assassination of most of House Stark), the countryside is still in ruins. Farmers are peasants are still harassed on a regular basis by bandits and corrupt soldiers trying to extort them for money. Through all this, as the protagonist, you have to end up dealing with House Bolton patriarch Roose bolton quite often.
“Fans of the show or books will recognize the time period of the game as well after the events of the Red Wedding.”
Generally speaking, the story of Game of Thrones Kingsroad – while initially fascinating – does end up feeling like a futile endeavour, since we know how the story ends courtesy of HBO’s TV adaptation, we know for a fact that House Tyre – a house created specifically for the game – will ultimately be of no real importance. We even know for a fact that the White Walkers will continue to be ignored by just about every major House south of the Wall until Daenerys Targaryen will make landfall on Westeros. Ultimately, the whole story ends up feeling like there aren’t any real stakes at all.
As for gameplay, tying up a grand and epic fantasy story that was considered compelling specifically because of its various characters and their political machinations with action RPG combat feels like a bit of a misstep. Game of Thrones has always been considered a low fantasy setting, which means that magical elements and fantastical creatures are such a rare sight that most people living in the world would have never even heard of them. As such, the action combat you frequently engage in will only really be against human enemies, which starts feeling dull and repetitive after your first few fights. It is worth noting that there are a few more fantasy-styled enemies to fight in the game, but aside from large wolves, these are mostly relegated to being multiplayer-only boss fights.
As for the combat itself, you get a simplistic combo system with your melee weapons depending on your combination of light and heavy attacks. A bow can also be used to initiate fights. However, due to its cumbersome nature, ranged attacks often feel useless after firing a couple of shots to start fights, since you’ll quickly get swarmed by enemies in melee range. Generally speaking, fights are incredibly simplistic. You’re going to spam your preferred combos, occasionally dodging or blocking an enemy’s attack, and sometimes even using a few special abilities – which are essentially just fancier looking combos in most cases.
“You get a simplistic combo system with your melee weapons depending on your combination of light and heavy attacks.”
There’s no real challenge in the second-to-second gameplay of Game of Thrones Kingsroad. Rather, the difficulty – when it’s present – tends to come from the progression system and your gear. Being under-geared for combat feels quite rough; enemies take longer to kill and they’ll hit you for much bigger chunks of your health bar. This can be alleviated by partaking in the several forms of progression that the title has to offer. These progression systems include a passive skill tree, another skill tree that lets you boost the damage of specific combos and abilities, a progression system for your gear that involves getting your hands on crafting materials, another one that involves leveling up various House Sigils, and a “research” system that involves your character figuring out how they can get extra bonuses from things they already have. Aside from being too numerous, these progression systems come with their own set of problems.
The two systems for skill progression are simple enough; you get your hands on upgrade books from finishing quests and exploring the world, which can then be spent on various nodes on these trees. These nodes range from offering flat damage boosts and improving your Rage generation, for example, to letting you pick out specific combos that will then start doing more damage. Just about every other progression system will involve quite a bit of grinding, waiting, and if Netmarble is lucky, you pulling out your credit card to pay real money.
Things like this start making it feel very obvious that Game of Thrones Kingsroad was designed with mobile as its priority platform. Along with the insane progression systems, nearly every UI and UX element seems tailored for touch screens in mind, with giant buttons and constant exclamation marks to bring your attention to various notifications that keep popping up during the course of regular play.
Thankfully, once you’re in game, the UX issues don’t really persist. However, other problems gradually become more noticeable. One of the biggest problems I had in my time with it was that the game was seemingly incapable of just shutting up and letting me play. Any time I completed a quest or explored the world to find a new area, I was bombarded with notifications that would try to reward me for my seemingly Herculean tasks.
“Familiar faces like Jon Snow or Roose and Ramsay Bolton appear in-game are also quite well-modelled”
Just killed a few bandits? Here are three separate windows, each offering rewards ranging from currency to RP points. Took down a boss in a group? Here are the rewards from that boss, plus rewards from your Battle Pass progression, PLUS rewards from the daily goal of killing a boss, among other things. This game definitely called to mind my experiences with other modern smartphone titles with action RPG gameplay like Blizzard’s Diablo Immortal, and definitely feels like a result of Netmarble focusing more on “player engagement” statistics than actually creating a fun, worthwhile experience.
In a game filled with all of these annoyances, even the way its inventory system works tends to just pile on to the list of grievances I have with Game of Thrones Kingsroad. While most items are split between your basic bags and your equipment bags, both of them feel absurdly small, and you’ll quickly run out of space after spending just 15 minutes in the wilds. Selling off excess items is also a pain; rather than having a system where you can mark items that you want to sell off, you instead have to sell off each piece of bad gear that you have no intention of wearing individually.
As for visuals, Game of Thrones Kingsroad definitely made some sacrifices to be playable on smartphones. On the PC version, the cutscenes are at a much higher level of quality than regular gameplay. And the visuals in the course of actually playing the title feel like nothing particularly noteworthy. The mountains and plains that dominate most of the game’s depiction of Westeros can start feeling quite dull, and aside from checking the map, figuring out just where you are in the world is a challenge since everything ends up looking the same. This, of course, is aside from the few major landmarks that the title adopted from the HBO show’s depiction, such as the massive Wall in the North, and the awesome-looking castle at Winterfell. Familiar faces like Jon Snow or Roose and Ramsay Bolton appear in-game, are also quite well-modelled, looking incredibly alike with the real-world actors that played these characters.
“Essentially, every time you take on a major boss, you can spend RP to get its rewards. You can run out of RP quite quickly.”
On the audio side of things, the game is filled to the brim with either generic orchestral pieces that are quite easily forgettable, or variations on the incredibly-popular HBO adaptation’s theme song. Speaking of which, you better get used to hearing that theme song quite often, since it’s used in a lot of places. A short riff from it even plays when you level up. The voice acting, on the other hand, feels competently done. While Netmarble wasn’t able to get the original actors to reprise their roles for the title, the new voice actors do an admirable job of sounding just like they did in the HBO show. Random quest givers and original NPCs also have voice acting that feels believable for the overall setting.
Generally speaking, Game of Thrones Kingsroad is not a fun game. It is filled to the brim with monetisation systems and roadblocks in progression that eventually forces a choice: wait for pay up. A key example of this is the RP system, which is the main way of getting rewards from multiplayer activities. Essentially, every time you take on a major boss, you can spend RP to get its rewards. You can run out of RP quite quickly, and while the resource does regenerate over time, you can also buy some more RP.
Combine all of the monetisation, the bad UI, the tedious progression systems, and the pointless story with gameplay that devolves into essentially just mindless button mashing through the same uninspired enemies and you get a title that shamelessly chases the success of better games in the market, but with little in the way of redeeming qualities.
This game was reviewed on PC.
