Some people here must be joking. Cyanides own forums is teeming over with people who are literally pissed off at this game for not delivering what it promised.
Basically what it is, is a very shallow world, if we take the HvH mode. No location or city or town got any names assigned to them. Your own capital town is called Feudal home. Very rich, very immersive. The game itself bases around gathering 100 presige points, which you have many ways to get but many fewer ways to lose. Generally speaking a game is rather short, since 100 prestige points isn't hard to achieve. When you've got them you won, game's over byebye cya next time. The only reason they label it "Brute military force is not the only way to win" is because brute military force can't win the game. By the time you get to tedious wars, the game is over. The game is really a capture the node game. Start with a base, send out envoys, noble ladies, spies and god knows what, and "ally" surrounding towns to gain income. You send out a peasant to manage the fields and 1-2 merchants to every town and gold mine to gain money. Essentially it's just a capture the node game dressed up and labelled as something creative. Unfortunately they failed to deliver. There are no hotkeys, no way to assign armies, the minimap is rubbish and the instructions and information is either wrong or contain typos. Unlike my review, their text should be flawless, the least to expect from a company. Nonetheless it's not. You can find "loose" instead of "lose" along with information that the minimap is on the left side while it's on the right. It could've been done so much better. In fact with a lot of tweaking it's a promising concept, just drop all the focus on the neutrals and increase the diplomacy and underhanding with the other houses. Give it a decent combat system, not combat focused, but you should atleast be able to fight your way through a game if you'd like that. Add more options. For heavens sake there's not even a way to change the victory requirements in HvH.
No spend your money elsewhere and don't let those "I rank this game 8 because I've never played any other strategy game and I think this is kind of good" fool you. There's a flood of better Strategy games out there. Europa Universalis 3, The Total War series, Civilization etc etc.…Full Review »
Gameplay that would feel right at home in the early 90's are the most forgivable of this games many faults. The campain and skirmish modes lack all that made the books so great. The ai is terrible, the political and underhanded side of the game is insulting after reading what the devs/publishers had to say...I know this sounds stunted and isn't much of a review but this game actually made me angry, that's how bad it is the graphics match the 90's gameplay and yet the load times are terrible. The skirmish mode's victory conditions can't be altered so you will lose over and over again for no apparent reason often related to your kingdoms "prestige" stat...bah just don't buy it it's awful. Not only because it plays and looks bad but because the books deserve far far better. hopefully someone makes a total war nock off with the promised deep political system that cyanide would have us believe is in this game, now that would be worth $40.…Full Review »
The realm A Game of Thrones takes place in is wondrous, exciting, imaginative and unique. Regrettably, the same cannot be said for the game--mainly due to the fact that it does not immerse you in this world and the game mechanics are not polished. In retrospect, it seems as if the game fails to deliver because of lazy developers. If you desire a strategy game, get Total War (any of them), a Civ game, Europa Univ or, if unit driven battles are your fancy, Star Wars: Empire at War. Whatever you do, don't be like me and buy this game for the lore, because it fails to deliver miserably in that respect.…Full Review »
