Game of Thrones: Conquest is a mobile game as disappointing as the last season of the show

As the last season of the super-popular TV show Game of Thrones is in full swing, you might have noticed ads about the “Official HBO GoT Strategy RPG” with all the familiar faces of the show’s actors. If you’re a fan of the show, you might have wondered if the official GoT mobile game is worth giving a try. So did we.

Game of Thrones: Conquest, as is the official name of the game, puts you in the role of a lord of a great house, as the mighty families of the GoT universe are called. Your newfound responsibilities include expanding your city with various buildings and upgrading them, training different types of military units, doing research and fighting enemies across the map.

Now that sounds quite exciting on paper, but as you've probably figured out already, with this being a mobile game, the reality is quite different. What you’ll mostly be doing is accepting things. Various prompts will be showing up telling you to do different things all of which can be done with a tap of a button. And everything takes time to complete. Real-life time, that is. At first, however, the game is generously letting you complete tasks for free, so you breeze through the first few levels of buildings and character development in minutes and are left with a nice sense of satisfaction. Once the game decides you’ve gotten the hit that will get you hooked, you slowly realize what it’s all about: waiting. And even more waiting.

Game of Thrones? More like Game of Timers

Once your freebies end, the long wait begins. Actions take from a couple of minutes to a full day and beyond. Of course, the game helpfully offers you to complete the task immediately by spending some of the in-game currency or a speed-up token. You receive some of those by playing the game, but if you really want to speed things up, you always buy more for real money, which is basically the whole point of the game (shocking, right?). If you want to get the most from the game but refuse to pay the cash, you have to check your phone every few minutes just to tap a couple of buttons.

The only real gameplay that’s not you just following a predetermined path is the combat element of the game. You get to choose what to attack and how many of your units to send into battle. The choice is between non-player enemies of different levels, other player's castles, or random mines and farms. After that, you’re back to waiting for the march to return and bring you the spoils of war, usually in the form of resources and experience.

As predicted, the “Game of Thrones” part of this game is mostly just cut-out stills of the different show characters and the overall theme of the setting which isn't too different from other castle-based games of that type. You'll see Daenerys pop up from time to time to say something about the dragons, and Tyrion is giving you important objectives such as "Upgrade to stables level 5". Oh, and you get to have a dragon if you're patient (rich) enough to go through the process of hatching it in the first place.