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I love the A Game of Thrones TV show. In my opinion it's the best medieval fantasy show ever made. The minute I heard there was going to be an Action RPG I was just filled with excitement. What I got as the end product wasn't exactly exhilirating.

The A Game Of Thrones RPG sets up two main characters, Mors and Alester, both of which are now canon in the “A Song Of Ice And Fire” universe. Mors is a man from the Night's Watch who act as guardians of the kingdom from attackers north of the Wall, he suddenly becomes spun into this political web with the death of his old friend Jon Arryn who was the hand of the king. Alester is a red priest who left his house in Westeros for 15 years while he dedicated his life to the fire god R'hllor. He comes back to Westeros to reclaim his lordship as head of his house Sarwyck.

'Both of them fit perfectly into the universe and they both have their interesting features. Mors can control his dog in a first person perspective tracking down scents and doing stealth kills. Alester can use the light of R'hllor to solve puzzles.....yeahhhh. You can use both of their powers during combat, Alester is slightly more interesting.

Alright, this is not an action RPG in the sense that everything is being performed in real-time. No, you're loading up actions and skills to use in battle while your character performs them. Most of the time you're going to put yourself in action slow-mo while you're selecting skills and letting them play out. It's hard to get used to it at first but then when you do it just feels a chore with every encounter. On top of that the RPG mechanics are just overly complicated with too many of them affecting combat. There's so many options which can cause you to dump points in specific weapons to use that you might not even find throughout the course of the game. You don't level up often so you'll have to strategically plan out what the hell you're going to do or start your game over from the beginning if you dumped wrong.

What I like best about the game is that the story is so well-written much like the books and the show. And with the ability to make decisions that aren't necessarily black and white. There's no colors or anything to indicate you're make a good or bad decision, you're just simply choosing what you feel. Which is awesome, there's also 4 different endings to the game. Mind you they're all tragic much like the source material but they're varied to your decisions.

The level design is crummy. You think you have choice as to where to go but most areas are so sparsely populated and there's not much to do aside from the main quest so you end up following a linear path to your objective. It's one of those games where they fail to convey you on where you're supposed to go and you're just out there figuring everything out by yourself.

The graphics are just abysmal. There's no other word for it. You're talking about having a license to make one of the best TV shows come alive in a true RPG fashion and you're game looks like it came out 7 years ago. What makes it even worst is the lack of graphical options on the PC version. No antialiasing, nothing. You're seeing jaggies, low-resolution textures, a small FOV, fog and bloom to cover the piss-poor graphics and it just hurts it. Even the text is hard to read because it gives off bloom.
The characters! Even the ones who are in the show and make an appearance in the game look terrible!

Aside from the main theme song from the TV show being played as the main menu theme I can't say there's another tune that comes even close to its greatness. Most of the time you'll hear some simple piano composition with background noise but not much else.

A Game Of Thrones RPG is a game that has so much potential with its source material and its just not there. The developers are too amateur to capture the spirit of the books/TV show, either that or HBO isn't throwing enough money at them. One could imagine what it would be like with BioWare production values but this is what we got. A well-written story, piss-poor presentation, excellent dialogue choices, and mundane combat. I hope the next game that comes from this license is of much higher quality or else we're never going to have a game that fully captures the essence that is “A Song Of Ice And Fire”.