It has been a long time since I had last played a game like this. The type of game you'd label "A Shameless Cash in."

With the fourth season of Game of Thrones hitting the air, you might feel inspired to do your own bit of dynastic warfare. I am here to stop you. Whatever you do; you don't want to spend a penny on this pile of refuse. Game of Thrones Genesis is a broken and convoluted mess. It has some nice ideas, but pretty much everything stop it from working as it should.

Game of Thrones Genesis is a Real Time Strategy game, but it has a twist. Instead of building units and testing your tactics against your opponents you are now in the business of building alliances and brokering treaties between the many colourful houses of Westeros. The goal is out out-prestiege your opponent. You achieve this by earning money, maintaining alliances with towns and castles, eliminating prominent enemy units, uncovering your enemies' bastard sons, and upholding the faith. To accomplish this you employ the services of assassins, envoys, rouges, spies and even your own daughters to break or make allegiences. If you think that this sounds pretty cool then you are sadly mistaken. The system is a micromanagement nightmare. It is impossible to see what you need to do, because each unit is highly specialised. Even your random highwayman can't just be told to kill the enemy envoy. You need another unit for that. To make matters worse, everything is tiny. Even my HD screen is too small to even give me a remote chance to properly click on the one unit I need.

When all else fails you can always resort to war. War is an utter joke. Declaring war will deduct points from your prestige, so you need to trick your enemy into declaring war on you. What AI that cannot even walk from end of the map to the other without burrowing through a mountain is going to take your bait? War cannot be waged with your regular security units. Oh no, you need armies; special units that need food to function. Food is a resource that is advertised in the game as much as Sarin gas is advertised as a nice party trick on children's tv programming. You need to put peasants to work the field. However, both the peasants and the fields are hidden in the horrible interface and the unsightly map textures respectively. The army units then are supposed to work with a rock-paper-scissors system, but it doesn't. You're lucky if your army even goes to where you ask it to go.

Just when you thought you had seen it all the crapshoot AI comes in. The campaign is joke. It tells the origin story of Westeros and the Iron Throne. You begin as the Martells and shortly after you play as the Targaryans to subjugate the entire continent. Only to lose it the inevitable alliance of Stark, Lannister and Baratheon in the endgame, followed by a little bit of 'What if' up at the wall. The problem is the crapshoot AI. The moment you start the stage the AI makes it move and beats you. The only way to win is by trial and error. Find out what the AI does, counter it in the first minute, and move from there. The AI will just keep on trying to do what it was going to do, but will fail forever. It is both lame and boring. What's the point of playing a Game of Thrones if there isn't even a real game to play.

Don't buy this game. Avoid it like the plague. Put it in chains, drag it up to the wall, send it north, dump a couldron of gold on it, bury it in soft peat and finally recycle it as firelighters to burn the box it came in.

This game is rough. It has some interesting ideas about how to do video game diplomacy and intrigue, but those ideas are undeveloped, and make the interaction between the houses of Westeros feel like the mere shuffling around of RTS game pieces. It does have an admirable commitment to the series lore, but to get to the lore, you have to play through a dreary campaign which includes frustrating escort missions. You can control a Targaryen dragon, and it feels pretty powerful, but the actual mechanics of doing so are excessively "gamey" (your dragon has a recharge time, making it less a creature of legend and more of an occasional special ability).

The presentation of the game is subpar, with a lot of tiny details that are just "off" enough to pull me out of the experience. And the RTS mechanics are a bit undercooked - there's not a lot of unit diversity (or distinctiveness to the units that exist) and the tech tree, such as it is, is mediocre. The most interesting part of the game is the specialized intrigue and diplomatic units, and even then, I find the challenge of not knowing which alliances are real or which units are loyal to be more of a test of mental endurance than a genuine political-style puzzle.

The game is not entirely without merit, but I would not recommend buying it without first seriously lowering your expectations.

This game was not what I was expecting at all. It was more like a fast paced board game than the sort of resource management and strategy game I thought it would be. I can't fault it for not being like the Total War games, which I was thinking it was, but I can fault it for not being particularly fun. As far as I can see from playing the tutorial and the first level, you basically run around with envoys and spies trying to keep alliances with towns while your opponents ruin your alliances and make their own. It can get a little hectic keeping up with all of that going on, while also trying to get some food or money together to make an army.

You don't build structures in this game, they already exist on the map. What you do is build units, which will carry out certain tasks like assassinations and spying. The goal is to build alliances with nearby towns and castles to keep yourself stronger and richer than your enemies. You do this to collect prestige points, which determine the winner of the map. The combat in this game is not at all exciting, since your armies will consist of around 8 little guys that will hack at the other side's armies until one team is dead. You don't really want to declare war too often anyway, since it will cost you prestige points. So you want to convince the other guy to declare war, and then spend some time chasing around his units to destroy them, all while chasing his envoys with yours so that you can keep them from stealing your alliances.

The graphics are decent but not particularly impressive. The music is standard fantasy fare. Not memorable, but not bad either.

It's just not as impressives as I was hoping for, and I think I only gave it the time I did because of the GoT license. It does go back a ways to give you a taste of some of the origins of the great houses of Westeros, but I felt like the license was not important to the gameplay. It was like playing a licensed version of Monopoly, wherein the lore of GoT only ran skin deep. Overall I could not recommend this title.

Grade: D

This game is just the name and nothing else. Basically is just a strategy game with no strategy at all, just a bunch of units of deception, politics and intrigue that doesn't feel coherent or well integrated into the game but awkward and forced.

The game forces you to constantly check the status of your alliances, your secret agreements, the enemy's secret agreements with your allies, the protection of your units (you even have to assign bodyguards to farmers because they're a yummy target for assassins), the vulnerable strategic units of your enemies like envoys, spies, brides, rebels and other assassins to send even more assassins after them. And all of that with one single purpose: making and keeping as many alliances as possible while trying to destroy as many as possible alliances of your enemies while producing enough food and gold to bring armies to the table.

And for a military based game battles are very simple: just send as many soldiers as you can, no others plan needed.

The mechanics of the game are just too complicated to be a game that worths paying for it.

A Game of Thrones - Genesis is a "boardgame" style strategy game with real-time-strategy elements. It's a simple concept: you begin with a "home base" and slowly expand your empire. But that is where simplicity ends: expanding your empire is accomplished principally by winning the loyalty of neighboring towns and castles with diplomatic envoys. The more towns that are loyal to you, the more income you have, and income will help you produce more units.

Then, you will need to create some spy rings in enemy cities, subdue spies in your own cities, assassinate nobles, and other nefarious acts in order to succeed. You can even have the enemy create and command units that he thinks are working for him, but are actually working for you. It is the most layered, deep espionage system I have ever seen in a game (think Civ4 times 15). That being said, I also feel that the game is too deep for an RTS, playing strategically requires a bit of deep thought and I felt intimidated about having to think faster than my opponent, rather than being able to take my time and press "end turn" like in Civilization or Master of Orion.

Here is most of the game's complexity in a nutshell: envoys create alliances, spies ruin alliances, nobles create blood alliances, assassins ruin blood alliances, guards block towns from assassins, spies and assassins working together can circumvent guards. Spies can reveal hidden enemy units, because about 90% of the units in the game are visible only to the player who controls them. They are on a generous "stealth timer" when in enemy territory.


The Good

* Great interface, smooth controls.

* A game so deep that it could never be released on anything but PC.

* The game is very well suited for multiplayer matches with a friend.

* It is kind of fun to learn, but I assume you cannot truly appreciate it until you have mastered the basics (which I was never able to do.)

* Lots of achievements to unlock.

* High skill ceiling.

The Bad

* Long load times

* Expensive pricetag, the game would be a fair buy at $10, but not $20.

* Very little connection to the A Game of Thrones series that we know and love, except for the Lannisters are all jerks and killed me in my first match.

* The game might be too complex for many people. I don't want you to confuse "complex" with "strategic." There are times when things are needlessly complex.

* Some small problems with the tutorial. It will direct you to "look at the map in the lower right corner," when the map is actually in the lower left. Also, the "back" button does absolutely nothing in the tutorial's dialogue boxes.

* High-learning curve.

* The game is not friendly to colorblind players. The fog of war is just a b&w version of the map, but it's very difficult to differentiate between the colored (visible) parts of the map and the b&w (fog of war) parts of the map, especially in snowy areas. If you are colorblind, you will go mad if you try to play as the Starks.

* The battle animations are, well, terrible - but I'd rather have bad animations than bugs. Additionally, although war is a large aspect of the game, 90% of the game is the espionage that happens before the war.

The Ugly

* Uses TAGES DRM. (5 machine installation limit).

The Verdict

If you are looking for an ultra-deep strategy game, pick this up. If you are new to 4X games, I would suggest waiting for it to go on sale for >49%, as the game is really hard to appreciate if you aren't already intimately familiar with its genre.


I'd be happy to answer any other questions that you may have, just message me.

If you are a huge fan of the books and play strategy games with gameplay similar to this then you just might like this enough - I for one do. In all fairness, it is not THAT bad: a big problem is that people were expecting this game to be more akin to Total War series - whereas that was never the game's goal. The development of the game started BEFORE the TV-series and it was not meant to tie-in to the TV-series in any way other than being set in the same universe - had the TV-series not existed the reception would have been more positive (even if not great) because people wouldn't have been overly hyped about "ooh, Game of Thrones strategy game!" (while the books did well by their own right before the TV-series, it was the TV-series that introduced mainstream audience to the books world). Granted, the game is nothing spectacular, but some people saying things like "worst game ever" etc is just downright hateful.

First off, I am recommending this game only for diehard fans of A Song of Ice and Fire, or anyone that wants an entertaining way of exploring the history of Westeros. Obviously, this isn't the HBO branded Game of Thrones you might be used to so the art or characters may look a little bit different.

The way you play this game is a very dumbed down version of any RTS you may think of, build units, take towns and castles, kill your enemy. The way any single player vs AI or multiplayer game works is in two parts: Peace time, where you build alliances and build up your power undertaking various actions either directly or indirectly against the rival houses and the method for taking towns and castles is using non-combat units. Once war breaks out in the seven kingdoms, you must now rely solely on your combat units to take the remaining towns and castles. The first house or houses to reach the required honor score wins. Each house will have their own special ancestral home which cannot be taken. The way you build units is a bit silly, allowing only one to be built at a time but you can queue up to 5, if funds and food allow. Gold and Food are the two forms of commerce, gold to buy mercenary units, non-combat units, and upgrades and food for your professional standing armies. The game uses an upkeep system so you must ensure you have an adequate supply of food to maintain your armies after they are built. Various non-combat units will give you bonuses to gold production and your peasants will level up with experience if you can manage to protect them and keep them alive, thus making them more efficient at harvesting. Each house has a unique unit that provides a special ability or skill but nothing spectacular, like a maester that can heal units for the Tyrells, or a direwolf bodyguard-type unit for the Starks. All houses have the same types of combat units available to them, so don't expect the Targaryens to throw dragons at you. The time period for the House vs House mode of play is right before the events leading up to Robert's rebellion.

The campaign, while not too expansive, is a semi-enjoyable experience taking place from the landing of Nymeria in Dorne to the Night's Watch defending the wall from Mance and the united free folk. The variety of missions you will play is obviously limited to the somehwat limited features of the gameplay itself, but it can still offer some fresh experiences other than escort unit A to point C.

All said and done, pick up this title at a heavily discounted price and for what it offers if you feel you get your money's worth then you've won.

Being a massive fan of the book series and television show, I bought this game the day it was released. It has gone down in history as one of my most regretted gaming purchases. Cyanide's A Game of Thrones - Genesis is a messily designed, technically janky game that I wouldn't recommend to any besides the die-hard fan, who isn't reading this review anyway.

The game is essentially a virtual board game, in which you send one of a few kinds of units around a map in order to maintain control of them. It's largely tedious and frustrating. You can do this in a story campaign, which gives you small maps and half-thematic objectives. I didn't make it far into this story and wouldn't recommend you do so. Much more tolerable if not actually enjoyable is the multiplayer mode, in which you select a larger portion of Westeros to fight over with computer or human opponents. Though I very much doubt you will find human opponents online at this point. The gameplay in the multiplayer mode is slightly more interesting, with a few more kinds of units and actions you can take.

To be frank, Genesis seems like a game designed with bullet points in mind. Marketing materials might say you can marry off your noble daughter to an enemy to cement an uneasy alliance, or send an agent to infiltrate the enemy AS an enemy agent, and then turn him when the enemy thinks he's hurting you with that double agent. Both of these are true, but these mechanics are very shallow and there are only a few of them.

In the end Genesis will likely leave you wanting, as a fan of Martin's world. I might recommend instead the actual board game from Fantasy Flight Games, or the Crusader Kings 2 conversion mod. Sadly, an amateur game modification is vastly superior and better supported than this official game.

Hands down the worst game I have ever purchased. They created some sort of 1990 (age of empires) like game, then took anything of value out...Then tried to sell it as "strategy" and under the pretense of being AGOT. There are no similarities to agot. Not even remotely. The combat system is atrocious. Graphics. Map. Gameplay. Everything. Bad. Dont buy this game, ever. For any reason.

However!!!! If you are a GOT junkie and absolutely need a fix... may I suggest mount and blade warbands? Download the mod by cozar called ACOK. It is absolutely fantastic. They recreate ESSOS and WESTEROS perfectly. The characters are all there. The quest lines are all relevant.

I'd feel sorry for writing this if I thought anyone put serious effort into this game, but I have no evidence of that.

I'll put it plain: Don't buy this crap. This is not worth your money. It barely counts as Game of Thrones, and I don't know why they put the word Genesis on there (I don't think it means what they think it means.) It's a generic, limited, poorly articulated strategy game that tries to pass pointless tedium as politics and intrigue. Its campaign has nothing to show for itself and I'd apologize to whoever I roped into playing it multiplayer.

If you truly want to have a Game of Thrones gaming experience, check out the Game of Thrones mod for Crusader Kings II. I think the current version requires some DLC to function properly but I assure you, it's worth it. For a free modification of an already-good game, it has a thousand times more complexity and good design put into it than Genesis.

If at any point you see another review of mine that says "I can think of worse games", I'm thinking of this.
Do. Not. Buy.