Review by: William Abner

A Game of Thrones: Genesis, a “licensed” real time strategy game from Focus-Home and Cyanide, is bursting with great ideas. The design is built around intrigue, spies, assassinations, and diplomacy with outright warfare playing a secondary role. In fact, you won’t see any large scale armies fighting it out; it’s more skirmish based even though you can certainly field military units, but massive armies fighting it out over the open plains of Westeros simply isn’t the focus. It’s as much political and backstabby than it is driven by arms – much like the novels upon which it’s based.

In part, that’s the problem with Genesis. There is a clear lack of design focus despite the interesting diplomacy and secret agent stuff that fuels the design. The interface simply can’t keep pace with all of the cool ideas present and in the end it makes the game nearly impossible to actually play after you learn what it’s trying to do.

The inadequacies of Genesis sneak up on you; the first few hours with the game tease you with its enormous potential. Genesis is a game about using envoys (diplomats) to convert neutral towns into allies. You simply build an envoy at your home castle and send him to the neutral town to talk his way into the town forming an alliance with your faction. Of course the enemies are also hiring envoys to do the same and if you leave an allied town unguarded an enemy envoy can simply walk in and use his tongue to persuade them to switch sides.

Many other units also play a role in these diplomatic affairs: spies can form secret agreements with towns so while you may think a town is on your side it’s really playing for the other team. Spies also play other roles such as rooting out enemy assassins and “inspecting” allied units and towns just to make sure they are on the up and up. Rogues are hired to cause riots inside a town, spreading a message of revolution to nearby towns as well. Rogues can also turn enemy units into double agents. You just THINK your envoy is acting on your behalf. The Royal Lady can make turning allied towns even more difficult by marrying them to the local lord. Then there’s the assassins, who do what you expect – they seek out individual units and try to kill them.

Sounds like a lot of worry about, right? It is. In fact it can be overwhelming at times. This isn’t even taking into account the hiring of mercenaries and armies who wander around the landscape stirring up trouble.

None of the diplomacy stuff is automated and controlling and keeping an eye on everything is a huge pain thanks to a terrible lack of indicators. You may not know an enemy envoy is at the gate unless you happen to see the little colored dot on the tiny mini map. Genesis would, much like Cyanide’s PC adaptation of the Blood Bowl boardgame, be a much better game in a turn based format rather than in real time.