Despite Game of Thrones being primarily about a collection of warring noble houses, each with their own legions of troops, there has never been a large scale RTS set in the universe. We’ve had a TellTale story game and a few RPGs, but never something that let us take the armies of the Seven Kingdoms into open warfare. Well, Game of Thrones: War for Westeros intends to scratch that particular itch – and based on what I’ve played so far, it might well succeed.
Ever since the TV show ended up having a worse ending than a colonic irrigation on a rollercoaster, HBO has been trying to win back the hearts and minds of its once-loyal fans. House of the Dragon made some headway, while A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has almost made Game of Thrones a household favourite again, and so War for Westeros may well benefit from positive interest where Game of Thrones: Kingsroad struggled.
At brass tack level, it’s a pretty straightforward base-building conquest game. In the demo I only had two of the Houses to choose from, they being Stark and Lannister. I played mostly as House Stark, which starts you with Castle Winterfell and a house and allows you to begin building your settlement around it.
It’s very standard stuff, too. Build a barracks for soldiers, build more houses for more workers; build an armoury and an archery range. If you put in a weirwood tree, you can pray for buffs. You’ll be given a scout, who can go and spy through the Fog of War and find new outposts that your soldiers can claim. Despite it not feeling overly fresh, there’s something about the iconography of this universe that really made it feel incredibly comfortable to me.
Hero units come in the form of famous Thrones characters. Jon Snow and Robb Stark, along with the direwolf Ghost for the Starks; Jamie Lannister for the other side. They act as commanders that bestow buffs on the armies near them, and have more health and deal more damage. It’s classic stuff, but it really works with this setting.
Combat is like most other 4X games. You build up an army by mining and spending resources, in this case gold, and pay for research to unlock new buildings and army upgrades. Then you march your armies into other armies and hope to the Seven that your little bars go down slower than theirs. There is more to it of course, but I’m not that tactically-minded. I am, however, a huge fan of this universe, particularly HBO’s interpretation of it, and this game lifts imagery and atmosphere right out of that show. It looks incredibly authentic, with places and races faithfully recreated so that it puts you right back into that world, firmly.
Having special characters with you gives you access to things like stronger attacks or temporary morale boosts, etc, so you will want to keep at least one with any larger force. Whether or not these characters synergise I don’t know, but it would be cool if the Starks and their wolves had special tandem abilities. Also, presumably the game will later feature dragons as well as Whitewalkers and, hopefully, some of those spiders as large as hounds we were told about by Old Nan. Unless the miserable crone was talking nonsense.
On the whole what I’ve seen has me quite excited. It’s been a while since I was really looking forward to an RTS (although with both Dawn of War 4 and Total War: Warhammer 40,000 incoming, my cup is about to runneth the hell over), but Game of Thrones: War for Westeros looks like it will capture every important element of the HBO series (including character likenesses), and hopefully won’t have an ending that takes a steaming slash over everything leading up to it. We can only hope.
Game of Thrones: War for Westeros is coming to PC via Steam in 2027.
