Initially I wasn't aware that there was a Game of Thrones RPG. So when I saw it I knew I had to play it. The story is great and the "Chapters" they use to tell it do a good job of mixing things up. There are a lot of choices which change the game as you progress which would normally make it a great RPG. However there are a few things that narrowed my impression to a more negative perception.
Beyond the story(or stories if you prefer) the game itself is obviously a port designed for the consoles. Like most other ports it was not designed for a mouse and keyboard. While you can play without a controller many claim it is much easier, and less glitchy, with one. This is something that has always bothered most PC gamers about ports and one would think the developers would learn to deal with this hassle by now. Unfortunately for some developers, like the ones who designed this game, that is not the case.
The textures are good and the modeling looks clean but the light and shadows are not good or clean. Going through a scene with blocky shadows and light on the face of a character tends to ruin the emotion and reaction to it. While I don't expect every game to look like Skyrim, I do expect every game to have decent light and shadows.
The combat is fun but at some time vague and other times based purely on luck. In places where the gamer must do some button-mashing just to progress to the next part of the scene or story there is no graphic telling you to do such, so after you fail or die you just keep trying again and again until you get angry enough to start pressing the same thing over and over again which apparently was the developer's intention. As I progressed through the game I couldn't decide whether the game was difficult or if I was just lucky enough to progress through it.
Which brings me to the merchants. Buying some armor or a better weapon would be nice but unfortunately 99% of any merchant's wares are obscenely overpriced and one cannot afford them until much later in the game. Worse is that the wares often don't make much sense as there is no balance in the stock, there is only overpriced god-items and then the cheap stuff you probably don't need or want. This tells me that there was not much thought put into balancing all this out.
With classes built to have a character wear one sort of armor I found myself often wearing light and medium at the same time. Even at the beginning of the game there was a mix of of all different types and since I couldn't buy anything and rarely found much loot besides things I would later sell (which didn't help me buy any of those overpriced items at the merchants by the way) there was nothing much I could do about it but pray for a good item to drop with a corpse -- this rarely happened unless you beat a boss character at the end of a "Chapter". By that time I obviously had little use for whatever was dropped.
Overall I was not impressed by this "port" and while the voice actors are the same actors from the popular TV show on HBO, the overall development does nothing to give this TV show any justice in the form of an RPG. Maybe they ran out of time to develop the game further? I don't know but it is what it is. I would not recommend this game unless you are a big fan of the series on TV because as a game I believe that it is not very balanced or entertaining.
4/10