After 3 Hours, I Can Say Game of Thrones Finally Has a Worthy Video Game

HBO’s Game of Thrones changed television by delivering unprecedented spectacle in the form of epic battles involving multiple armies, legendary heroes and villains, and mythical monsters like dragons and giants. Fans who have imagined what it would be like to be fully immersed in one of those dramatic conflicts will finally get their chance with next year’s Game of Thrones: War for Westeros, PlaySide’s real-time strategy game in the mold of The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth and Warcraft 3. After playing three hours of a hands-on demo, I’ve barely scratched the surface of the game’s deep mechanics, and I’m eager to learn more about how best to lead my armies to victory.

I played against an AI opponent in a series of 1v1 matches as both House Stark and House Lannister. While both follow some of the same basic play patterns – building structures on resource nodes to gather the gold and influence needed to deploy troops and construct more advanced buildings – their strategies quickly diverge. I would have thought I’d be partial to the Starks, who can field Jon Snow, Robb Stark, and the dire wolves Grey Wind and Ghost as powerful hero units that can bolster your armies and use devastating attacks against your enemies. But the wealthy Lannisters have finer control of their economy, able to exchange gold and influence, which makes it easier to get a production engine going — and to recover from planning mistakes.

War for Westeros creates a constant push and pull between fortifying your territory with defenses and more units, and trying to conquer and hold new territory so you can gather resources more quickly and establish the dominance needed to win a match. On easy mode, the AI will give you plenty of time to build up and advance through the deep tech trees. In normal, you’ll feel constant pressure to keep up and can never afford to spread your forces too thin.

The Starks can recruit defensive units from the Night’s Watch or more offensive Free Folk, eventually unlocking access to both if they upgrade their keep enough. The Lannisters can build a sept to the Seven to access powerful buffs and eventually rain down Wildfire, which can devastate entire armies. You’ll need to carefully choose what units and upgrades to invest in based on your opponent’s strategy. Every unit has its own strengths and weaknesses, so you need the right mix to handle cavalry, infantry, beasts, and siege weaponry.

Image: PlaySide

That balance is sure to become even more challenging to manage once the other two factions – the White Walkers and the Targaryens – are unlocked in the full game. Fights are rarely fair in the world of Game of Thrones, and I’m eager to see the chaos that will ensue when four armies with their own heroes and specialized units are fighting in a free-for-all match. PlaySide has positioned the game as a way to change the outcome of the series, and beyond providing plenty of opportunities for Robb to kill Tywin in skirmishes, I’m really eager to see what the developers have planned for the campaign mode’s story.

Image: PlaySide

Heroes level up in battle, so you’ll want to deploy them early and often to unlock new abilities. They’re also the only units capable of claiming new territory, so you’ll need sufficient forces to protect them while a countdown is running and your opponents rush to interrupt you. Luckily, there are lots of ways to fine tune the AI controlling your units. You can instruct them to stand guard to make sure they don’t chase an enemy into a trap and leave your hero undefended. They can also be tasked with patrolling between key points they need to defend.

Graphics are never the most important thing in a RTS game, but War for Westeros looks sharp. There are plenty of fine details, from the movement of water in the rivers you cross, to the wind blowing through trees, to the clear features of the heroes based on Game of Thrones stars Kit Harington and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. The gameplay is extremely smooth, and the interfaces are intuitive. An RTS of this complexity can be overwhelming, but there are plenty of easy ways to view your workers, soldiers, and structures to help you keep track of everything that’s going on and quickly issue new orders.

PlaySide has drawn on generations of RTS games to craft War for Westeros, which seems like it will deliver everything I want from the genre. I could have easily spent a dozen hours with this demo alone testing out new strategies for both factions by trying to level up different heroes or experimenting with advanced units. When the full game is available, it feels like it will take me as long to truly master as watching all eight seasons of the HBO show.