GAME OF THRONES GENESIS PC GAME REVIEW

GAME OF THRONES GENESIS PC GAME

game of thrones : genesis pc game

Political maneuvers are part and parcel of Martin's books, so it's appropriate that Genesis should make them its centerpiece. In a typical RTS, you gather enough resources to build an army to crush your opponent. You do gather resources here--gold for hiring standard units and food for purchasing armies--but much of your maneuvering is subtler than you might expect. You build the foundation of your strategy not on worker bees or armor-clad knights but on envoys. These grizzled messenger-men convert the towns spread across the map to your cause and are the first step toward gaining superiority. As your influence spreads, you must use other underhanded means to diminish your opponent's. Spies dispel the fog of war and allow you to create secret agreements with villages. You use noble ladies to create blood pacts, strengthening your relationships. You use assassins to slice the throats of innocent merchants as they transport resources back to their enemy's feudal home; send rogues to instigate uprisings in unallied towns; and arrest pesky enemy spies with guards, who haul them to prison and hold them for ransom.

These are but a few of the ways you can disrupt the enemies' plans while creating and maintaining allegiances, though of course, you have to also attempt to thwart their attempts to do the same. It's a shame that the inept single-player campaign fails to put these mechanics to good use. Not one mission uses the full extent of the game's features, and few of them require much in the way of strategy. Instead, you get long and tedious games of hide-and-seek, where you either send a single army across the map in search of friends and foes or command a single unit that must avoid the watchful eyes of roaming guards.

In other cases, you accompany an automated unit as an escort--which is neither strategic, nor much fun. You spend far too much time clicking and waiting, without having anything actually happen. "Control a single army and click on things until they die" tasks aren't uncommon in the genre, but they make up a good half of Genesis' campaign. The final mission is not an explosive, nail-biting conclusion that unites the game's mechanics into a satisfying whole but another "click until stuff dies" embarrassment. The campaign is an odd mishmash of random, unrewarding objectives without any sense of momentum--and it rarely uses the game's most interesting elements.