It's as if someone left the game sitting out in the sun too long where it shriveled and dried up. The colors are muted and gritty, but not in a stylized, Company of Heroes kind of way. The units are tiny and were it not for the (equally small) banners above their heads, it would be impossible to tell who was whom. So if it's not the characterization or the intricate storytelling that draws you into A Game of Thrones: Genesis, what is the game going for? Boiled down to its essentials, this is a boardgame. Needless to say, for me, this could have been any generic strategy game of the late nineties.
#Game of thrones genesis tv
Everything that made the Game of Thrones TV show (and presumably, the novels) unique is lost here, with nothing but the mention of characters and places to tide you over. "I bet you always wondered how the Kingdom of Dorne was founded, right?! Oh wow, now we are heading to the Frozen North! Aren't you excited?!" Meanwhile, random lords talk to each other in the most expository way possible, essentially reading bullet points off a teleprompter. Rather, the story is handled in a limp-wristed, colorless way that seems as though the game were looking to me for excitement, instead of the other way around. The problem is not that the story in the campaign is incomprehensible without first reading the books, like The Witcher games tend to flirt with. The reason I mention the context with which I approached this game is that I believe developer Cyanide Studios is counting on the GoT faithful to glom onto this title. While I'm certainly not rabidly chomping at the bit in anticipation for season two, my curiosity was certainly piqued for this under-the-radar game installment. When I finally did settle down to run through season one of the HBO series, I found it to be good but not great.
I had never even heard of the books (I stopped reading medieval fantasy novels in Junior High) and even when there were blogs and articles with Sean Bean's somber form plastered all over the Internet, my attention was never grabbed.
I was a late-comer to the whole Game of Thrones phenomenon.