Through the course of many years, I've kept up with the dealings of Westeros, and to some extent, been a part of the very game of thrones. If one plays the game of thrones, you either win or you die.

Straight to the point: This game is flawed from the beginning. The only achievement this game successfully hits is delivering a very involved story that could have easily been ripped from a notebook of the author. Let me detail the flaws before I shed any light into the pros, as the list of flaws far exceeds any good you may find.

The technical issues of this title are difficult to look over. I've played games on the PS2 that had better visuals than what this game was built on. With abhorrent and unacceptable texturing and character models, this game was released about eight years too late. The visuals do not fail to provide there either, as cut scenes are very choppy with overly redundant animations, dialog and facial features not synced. This is very surprising, considering that the game was built on the Unreal engine.

The combat system, while tactically elaborate, does not mesh well. In an odd mixture of real-time, free roam combat, this would work ideally if the environments would also aid in this. A player will need to be attentive of designated targets, distance between opponents and available stamina. This is not difficult to manage, but when swapping between controllable characters, the others may not maintain their established actions which lead to many stupid situations. If I had a penny for every time one character got stuck on a wall instead of running around to attack the target, I'd have enough to replace the cost of this title.

All that being said, I finally land on a few highlights. While this game's combat is as buggy and awful as mentioned above, it provides a ton of elaborate combat options. I decided to play this game on the hardest difficulty to experience the most this game could throw at me. With cool abilities available to the two main characters, there were many different ways of declaring victory over the opponents, and as a story buff, this was quite entertaining. 

The environments that this game occupies are very accurate in their descriptions by the book. Locations like Castle Black and the Red Keep are well attempted in their layout, but once again the awful visual representation does not do this attentiveness any justice. It was neat to see characters in the game as they look in the show, but this only reinforces the notion that hardly any time was involved with the creation of both game and show.

I enjoyed this game on a personal level, but this is only due to a long history of RPG games, and my love for this series. If you do not count yourself as one or both of these, you will not enjoy this experience.