![]() ![]() ![]() It’s a game of dark fantasy babysitting.Ĭontrast that with a recent colony-building RTS, Stranded: Alien Dawn, where managing individual characters is extremely dependent on their strengths and weaknesses, but rather than babysit them you provide the basics, diversify resource income, and improve overall conditions-not personally remind them to drink enough water. Most of the difficulty is in ensuring that Jim Thatcher gets a regular mead break so his sanity meter doesn't go all the way down, and that he doesn't blindly and suicidally wander into an obvious monster den on his quest for more reeds. It's challenging to be sure, but the challenge comes from tedious micromanagement of where your villagers are allowed to go and when. Like a guy who's only good at fighting but loses Sanity in combat-that's just a waste of food and gold so you make him fistfight bears until he dies.īecause for all the noise that Gord makes about being a survival game, it's just not that hard – even on the hardest difficulties. If someone's bonus is so good or bad that you actually notice it, well, you keep them around or send them into the swamp to die, respectively. Nobody cares that Jim is afraid of plant monsters because Jim spends all his time on the wheat farm. ![]() In classic colony-builder style each also has skills that make them better or worse at certain tasks than other villagers, alongside a few personality quirks that are, generally speaking, very, very easy to ignore because they provide an extremely rare circumstantial penalty or bonus. Sanity is the most interesting of the three, decreasing the longer someone spends away from the Gord in the dark and alone, whereas Health and Faith are just pools of points to keep full so that they stay alive and/or act as batteries so you can use spells. On top of this you have villagers that are your RTS-style units, each with a health, sanity, and faith meter. More of that would’ve gone a long way to help break Gord out of its laborious rut. A scant few scenarios made me change my template: A map with long winters means you can't rely on mushroom gathering, for example, and should trade for more of your food. Every task has a best way to meet its challenge, from food gathering to map exploration, that quickly becomes repetitive to execute. Its campaign focuses on scenarios that are each about an hour and a half long, which means you repeat the same build order over and over, occasionally modifying it when the campaign trickles out a new building or upgrade tier. There simply isn't enough variety of buildings and resources to make Gord function as a compelling colony sim. That might be fine if the colony sim was deeper than a five-resource, dozen-building RTS, or if the characters had engaging personalities with strengths, weaknesses, wants, and needs. It's nothing like the strong base-building defense games of recent years, with neither the defensive flair of They Are Billions or the strong resource management of Northgard. Later you can just expand the walls, so the limited space never becomes a challenge to think your way through. Space is at a premium, as are resources, so sometimes you need to make a choice like "Do we want fishermen or hunters?" In practice, though, you'll just play fiddly Tetris with building placement and, as a worst-case scenario, knock down something you no longer need to make room for more. Your town of six to 18 villagers is confined to the gord, and every building must be made inside the palisade space so that it's protected. Of course, I’ve seen worse stories fail to sink a solid game, but Gord's gameplay turns out to be uninspired and shallow as well. The lone good voice performance, the obnoxious and disgusting king's emissary, salvages his own cliche-ridden lines, but can do nothing to lift up everyone and everything else. None of the writing is either meaningful or memorable. Most of the background comes in the form of a lore journal, the Chronicle, that narrates stories at you in pseudo-archaic language. ![]() It's just people regurgitating backstory in lieu of anything notable happening around you. The plot inevitably delves into a Slavic-inspired dark fantasy spiel about dead gods and epic conflicts, but it does so without any real flair or dramatic voice. ![]()
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