Developer – Netmarble Neo

Publisher – Netmarble

Platforms –   PC (Reviewed)

Review copy given by Publisher

NOTE:

The following game is being reviewed in an Early Access State, the game may change after the release of this review, this review reflects the game at the time of publishing. Due to the game changing more drastically then other Early Access Titles and a lack of current players influencing major in-fame events , we have decided to not give a review score at this time, and rather a opinion.

Winter has finally come with the arrival of Game of Thrones: Kingsroad by Netmarble. Kingsroad features a brand new story set in the lands of Westeros. It has been over 10 years since the last Game of Thrones RPG game that was released on the PS3 and Xbox 360, with this long gap of content for fans, there has been quite the buzz around this release. I was super excited to get a chance to play Kingsroad and after putting in 25 hours so far this last week I have a lot to discuss.

First off, let’s get one thing clear, Kingsroad is at heart a huge step in the right direction for content set within the world of Game of Thrones. While it certainly isn’t perfect, as there are quite a lot of technical and gameplay elements that have faults, the amount of content and lore stuffed into the game are fantastic. You can walk from The Wall to King’s Landing and experience everything in between as you journey through the land as the bastard child of House Tyre. 

Your character is fully customizable and you can play as a Sellsword, Knight, or Assassin. Each class has unique abilities, skills, and traits that you can pick and choose at any time for the situation you find yourself in. You can freely reset your skills and talents at any time so you can experiment with your character and not feel locked in or held back in any way which is a great feature. The combat system is engaging and the animations behind your attacks have a cinematic feel. I was pretty surprised specifically by the animations and playing as my Assassin felt satisfying. The attacks also use a combo system between the number of light and heavy attacks which change the flow of combat and the abilities your characters use themselves.

The gameplay has a similar loop to Assassin’s Creed games. The map has key points of interest where you take part in specific activities to gain loot and experience to increase the power of your character. Your power level is defined by a stat called Momentum. Momentum is basically the way the game power checks your character before taking on certain activities or accessing areas of the map. Very occasionally, you can potentially wander into a section of the map that is a much higher Momentum rating and the enemies will absolutely destroy you in one hit. This directs you to follow a certain path around Westeros to not get ahead of yourself in exploration. 

The ways you can increase your Momentum of your character are as follows. Equipment, Skills, Traits, and Set Research. Each character has specific Active skills that they can use and at any time you can equip three of those skills. These skills are individually leveled and each level amplifies the damage modifier of that skill. As you level your character, you unlock more skills that you can choose from and the really nice thing is that when you do finally unlock a new skill, you can reset the total skills points spent upgrading your initial skills and use those points to level your new skill so you never lose any progress you make in the investments to your characters. These skills can be as simple as a roundhouse kick that causes high stun rates and others like igniting your weapons in flames to deal high amounts of damage in the initial explosion and additional damage over time as the enemies burn to death. 

The second way to upgrade your character is through upgrading specific attack combos which are listed as Default skills. Stealth attacks, stun punishing Mighty Attacks, and light and heavy attack combos can be modified through this system. There are specific attack combos that have modifiers that can be upgraded in specific intervals, for instance a 1 light attack into 2 heavy attacks combo can be used to heal your character when attacking a poisoned enemy. This regeneration is unique to this combo and only if you level up the ability in that specific way. Each of these combos should be explored to see how to best benefit your gameplay style and the types of enemies you are facing. Perhaps this combo is not the best suited to the boss you are fighting and perhaps a 4 light hit to 4 heavy hit combo is better. This combo can remove all stacks of a modifier to unleash a heavy final hit while also healing 7% of your HP. I absolutely love this combat system and looking into what little tricks I can pull off by leveling my skills in specific ways.

Another way to upgrade your character is through traits, there are three trait trees that can be invested in and each of these trees provides passive bonuses to your character like higher critical hit chance, critical damage, a flat attack power boost, and many more. The same stats can be upgraded even further by researching equipment sets and donating your extra gear that you don’t need into learning more about those equipment sets. This is the benefit of the mobile game nature, you see a lot of these massive ways to upgrade your character by implementing different systems in the game that are designed around generating more money for the game, in the case of Kingsroad it’s not required to spend additional money to use these systems.

I was really invested in the gameplay loop and the content of the game as it has been a long time since experiencing Game of Thrones and it sucked me in, but one major aspect of the game holds it back, microtransactions. Kingsroad, being developed by Netmarble, has its roots in mobile game tactics. There have been some successful instances of this design style seen in games like Genshin Impact, and there are a lot of great uses of it in Kingsroad. However, there are key features which really impact the enjoyment of Kingsroad. The main one that comes to mind is your inventory system.

There are a few things that do cost additional money but a lot of these systems recharge daily or over time, but you can actually use your money to refresh these systems quicker. While we are on the subject of microtransactions, this game has several ways to spend money that I really don’t mind such as skins for your mounts, and characters, but there are ways that I really dislike. The inventory system is one of the worst I’ve seen in modern gaming. For instance, the amount of basic items you can hold in your inventory is extremely low, this includes rewards for quests, completing milestones in the game, or progressing in your battle pass. You will easily hit the cap of items you can hold very quickly and the ways you can increase the amount of items you can hold are limited to a few ways. First, getting vouchers as rewards or by purchasing the voucher through a very few amount of shops with in-game currency, these rewards are so far in between that I was leaving behind items that I couldn’t even pick up or open a chest that had those rewards. I can’t believe this system passed it to the full game but it is expected as the other route to increase your inventory limits is by using currency through microtractions or purchasing the monthly subscription. 

This is by far the biggest issue I have with Kingsroad and I think after a purchase of the full game to know you have to drop more money to even pick up items past the limits is very predatory. On top of this, purchasing the editions like the Deluxe Edition hurt you even more in your inventory because there are items that sit in your inventory that you can’t use until you make additional characters or you may want to hold on to other items you receive until later in the game so your very limited initial inventory space is already reduced further by making a higher tier purchase of the game.

Progression through the story is what you would typically expect from these sorts of games, you will come across many people that you may recognize from the show and books but most of the events of the show are mentioned in the game without taking part in them. This is a standalone story about coming into your own as a character and heir to your house and has no overall impact on the story we know so far of Game of Thrones as a whole. A lot of the time spent in the game is undertaking quests for House Bolton so that you can get the backing to make it to King’s Landing to become Heir to your house. This makes the story more interesting as I always kinda felt like I was in this weird situation where I knew I was helping out characters that I do not agree with but will for the better good of my own character and my House.

In terms of my House Estate, there is also the aspect of rebuilding my House from the ground up. Through completing quests you are able to gather materials for rebuilding your House by leveling up the local shops and buildings that benefit your character by being able to send workers on expeditions, increasing the capabilities of the local forge to craft better weapons and armor, and also creating jewelry pieces to help enhance my abilities. These individual items also have their own refining and augmenting systems to help further expand on these pieces. I also found myself trying to craft better items that suited my build and it is a satisfying gameplay loop. I also appreciated the Set Research system allowing me to not waste anything that I found or crafted by using those items to further my stats permanently.

Visually the game is very hit or miss. Overall, the world is serviceable, it’s not the best looking game by any stretch of the imagination, which I can imagine is hampered by the mobile version of the game. There will be times where characters are much more detailed and look pretty decent in conversations and mid-conversation the focus will blur the characters details and almost shift focus to the background instead of the characters which is obviously a technical glitch. Voice acting for the most part is decent and most of the characters in the world even side quest givers will be fully voice acted, but then a random scene will be absent of voice acting all together which is jarring. Other times character animations will be frozen and the dialogue will continue, but no mouths will be moving and the characters will be static. Other times, the characters voice acting will be finished, but the characters will continue to move as if they are still talking and the game will wait to progress to the next line of dialogue once the characters movements and lips are finished with their animation. I don’t know if this is a budget limitation or a technical glitch during that moment and it’s probably a little bit of both.

There are many aspects that I truly enjoy about Game of Thrones: Kingsroad and many that I really dislike but overall I have enjoy playing the game. I did end up buying a monthly membership to test what this does to improve the game and it instantly relieved the main gripes I had about the inventory system as it gives you about double the space. The fact that I had to even go down that road to have a serviceable inventory is mind boggling, but it is what it is. Over the past week I put in a good 25-30 hours into it and will honestly play a lot more as I try to accomplish all that there is to do in the game. Story wise, I believe I have another good 15-20 hours left and then there is continuing some end game content trying to get the best gear by fighting world bosses, partaking in events, and doing co-op with other players to fight 4 player boss fights. The hardest part about testing any of these aspects currently is the amount of time it takes to get to fight the world bosses and the overall population that is currently playing the game. As time goes on hopefully more people will play the game and these queues will be shorter and increase the feasibility of fighting these bosses.

The bones and foundation of Kingsroad are there. With a bit more polish and tweaking of these systems there will be a lot to enjoy here and I know that they are working on making these fixes as just today they made more adjustments to in-game systems such as the ease of healing your character and the adjustment rates of the in-game currency for purchasing items. These are all good signs for a game in Early Access and I can only hope that they continue making these Quality of Life changes for the betterment of the game and the players that are investing their time and money into it.