Game of Thrones: Kingsroad, a new action RPG set in an era of Westeros that the series' TV show explored roughly 11 years ago, was met with cautious enthusiasm when it was announced last year. A story-driven RPG adapting a literature and now multimedia powerhouse? Well, The Witcher proved that formula can be good. Do tell. That enthusiasm dropped sharply when the developer revealed that, though there is a PC version, Kingsroad will be a mobile game.
Now, great action RPGs are available on phones. I'm our resident Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero representative, after all, though I play those on PC, too. But, based on its newly minted demo, now available in Steam Next Fest, Kingsroad doesn't feel like one of the good ones. It feels more like the kind of mobile-to-PC port that made a whole lot of Game of Thrones fans sigh when the target platforms were revealed. Like a twin-sized sheet stretched over a queen-sized bed, it deserves some praise for holding together, but I've double-checked my bag of praise and that's about all I could find.
This is, I gather from the demo's rapid introduction, a third-person action-adventure RPG about your character, sculpted from a pretty decent set of customization options – ooh, one more crumb of praise in the bag – dealing with White Walkers with our good friend Jon Snow. Yes, Jon says the thing. Winter update: coming. It's all presented fairly well, but when it has to act like a game, Kingsroad falls apart pretty quickly, and that's without getting into the nightmarish implications of mobile game reward tracks like this:
So far, Game of Thrones: Kingsroad feels like a mediocre version of myriad action game mainstays. You can play as a knight, sellsword, or assassin class, and even group up in co-op "to earn generous rewards and craft high-end gear." There's melee combat with light attacks, heavy attacks, blocks, dodges, finishers, and skills tied to a mana-like resource, but nothing about it is very responsive or impactful. Combat was previously described as "skill-driven," which is technically correct in that it has skills in it. There are stealth bits, but enemies are dumb as a bag of hammers and about as agile, so clearing camps of repetitive Wildlings – I found three of the same guy in one camp of, like, nine guys – isn't terribly interesting.
There's a chase scene where you dramatically clamber over obstacles and climb through a crack in a big rock, ensuring feature parity with basically every action-adventure game from PlayStation Studios. But it's all just going through the motions, holding forward as your character proceeds on rails. The ex-mobile jank puts a film over everything, and the demo ran fairly poorly for a game whose recommended specs are comfortably within my PC's. The lock-on camera, in particular, gives me fits. It did register my PS5 controller fairly well, though.
This isn't an aggressively awful demo, but the best thing I can say about it is that it functions, but isn't very fun. It is a Game of Thrones video game, but I would never have given it more than five minutes if it was a regular video game. While this Steam Next Fest demo is just a vertical slice subject to changes, for a game that's coming in Q2 2025, I'm not optimistic that enough can be improved to compete. I've played much better action RPGs on mobile, and I've played roughly a zillion more on PC without Kingsroad's heavily foreshadowed, mobile monetization mess.
