Gord Review (PS5, PS4, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, & PC)

Suppose you’re the kind to prefer overseeing townspeople, giving out orders based on skills and personality, and ensuring everyone lives in harmony and prosperity. In that case, you might consider taking Gord out for a spin. Well, except it’s not your everyday kind of real-time strategy game. 

Just a mere few seconds into the playthrough, a forest abomination demands a blood sacrifice, and no, it doesn’t want a full-grown human being. Rather, a child. Full disclaimer, Gord isn’t a family-friendly game at all, with monstrosities freely roaming around its domain. 

Sure, you’ll spend some of your time developing a functional colony, gathering resources, and ensuring the sustenance of your tribespeople. But a larger portion of your playthrough is spent hunting down Witcher-kind bloodsuckers, battling them out till their last breath, and dealing with the repercussions for your sanity.  

This is just a snippet of all Gord has to offer, with a definite promise of bleak but interesting flair for strategy lovers out there. The premise alone isn’t enough, though, and so after a deep dive into Gord, here’s what I would say is worth checking out, as well as what's best left for dead.

Story Story, Story Come

A new king has risen through the ranks. And as is customary, he wants to expand his territory and exert his influence as far as the eye can see. He commands you, his loyal steward and leader of a small tribe, to venture out into the depths of darkness and claim new land for him to rule. You’re not alone, though, as a group of locals tag along alongside you, lending you an ear as you go on about how unfair the world is.

You’ll need a sanctuary to retire to after spending your days hunting down monsters. So, you set up a “Gord,” translated into a stronghold, within the walls of a Pallisade ring-like structure. Here, your tribe can remain safe as you lead them toward building a new civilization. As you can likely tell, Gord is a mashup of the real-time strategy and colony simulation genres. It also takes a step further to knit a storyline around the campaign’s events.

Whatever You Say, My Lord

Gord’s development team comprises former Witcher developers, and you can outright see their influence on the final product. Set in a dark, brooding world, a small town tribe sets up camp on a hellish, mushy swamp. The sun never rises here, with eternal darkness hovering over the land for pretty much the whole story. It’s a dark fantasy setting, taken a little too seriously, with the only light source streaming out from the Gord.

It’s a pretty compelling atmosphere, a bleakness that’ crawls on your skin, constantly making itself aware with every step you take. That, and a melancholic, medieval soundtrack, exceptionally infused with Slavic undertones. Together, they create a constant sense of dread that helps carry forward a people living under the mercy of a ruthless king.

As the leader, you’ll need to make tough life-and-death choices that seem easy at first. Since each person has an overwhelmingly detailed resume, your role is to assign them tasks they’re suited for in service to the tribe. You have lumberjacks to collect wood, scouts to sit atop a watch tower and warn the colony of incoming raids, meaderies to heal people, and so on. Each person is vital to the tribe's well-being, which means their health, sanity, and faith meters have to be monitored constantly.

Go Wild, or Go Home

People with their meters on high will give their all to the cause, whether it’s gathering resources to replenish the Gord or battling the horrors of the night. If their meters run low, especially “sanity,” they tend to defy your commands or walk themselves into danger. And so, constantly keeping an eye out for people on the brink of madness is key.

The sanity system is quite sound; if you spend way too much time hanging outside the Gord, alone and freaked out, your sanity levels drop way low. Or, if you witness the death of another soldier, especially if it's your kin, you’re likely to go mad. In this case, you’ll need to drag those at-risk to the safety of the Gord in well-lit areas, or sometimes, if they’re too gone, resort to leaving them out to die.

Having to keep an eye on sanity meters is one thing. But there’s a lot more to manage elsewhere. You need different types of buildings to keep the colony alive, and each one must be put up within the confines of the Gord. And so, at certain points, it became like a game of Tetris, figuring out where to place buildings—the temple or the military ones—and ensuring there were enough food stores around.

Brick by Brick

Unfortunately, the variety of buildings you can put up isn’t nearly as complex as one might hope. Nearly all of the base-building mechanics are fairly basic. And the special ones have a special menu to look up. What’s worse? Each campaign repeats the cycle. Essentially, put up buildings within the Gord, then start all over on the next mission.

The same goes for resource gathering. It’s not a particularly exciting element to make your heart pump faster than usual. Often, you’ll send out people to pick mushrooms and stock them up in solos. When that’s done, you send out more people to collect rare metals like gold or iron to upgrade your units for combat – more on that in a few.

The problem is Gord wants you glued to every task at hand. If you don’t keep a close eye on gatherers, they may wander off into dangerous grounds and get themselves killed. Send out more people to help them, and they return with mental health issues. In that state, they can barely contribute much to the well-being of the colony, and so you’re forced to resort to purposefully sending them back to the wolves.

That’s only in the grand scheme of things. Intricately, you may have to remind people to eat or drink water, all tedious tasks that could have made more sense if you were engaging with intriguing personalities. But Gord barely develops individual characters to the most intricate levels. Instead, you only read their skills and traits on the menu and then proceed to assign them to any task you so please, with no significant consequence, making the whole exercise redundant. 

Tooth and Nail

For the most part, you’ll spend time sending out troops into unknown territories, where they’ll kill anything in their path, return to heal in a bathtub, and then return to the battlefield over and over again. Rinse and repeat. That’s basically it. The monsters, on the other hand, are quite beautiful reincarnations of Witcher-type monstrosities, albeit with Gord’s own unique visual style. They also use varied special attacks, from dropping poison mines to leaping onto your face. 

But the strategy is always, more or less, the same. Send three dudes to stab them, and then remember to retire them to the Gord to recuperate. As far as progression goes, the combat and the story, too, kind of fall flat as soon as the repetitiveness of Gord’s gameplay loop starts to sink in. Sure, monsters grow stronger in later campaigns. But the counter strategy for that are only to increase the number of troopers. Plain and simple.

Verdict

Compared to the influx of high-caliber real-time strategy games on the market right now, like Age of Empires and Company of Heroes, Gord has a lot of work cut out for him. Playing the latter really feels like a part of high-stakes missions. Each decision matters, whether there are bountiful returns or a huge price to pay. But when most of what you do involves giving “send the miner back to work” and “move away from the wolves” chores to not nearly as interesting characters as one can hope from a dark fantasy world, the overall experience soon starts to take its toll.

Not to mention the UI and overall map are overly cluttered. Being an indie game, Gord has plenty going for it visually. But it competes with a shockingly obtuse interface that takes forever to navigate. Finding and selecting people is a tedious process—far more than it should ever be. Some of the font colors are hard to read. Unassigning roles is impossible to do, not unless you can reassign them in an entirely unnecessary backpedal process. It should feel smooth and easy to find stuff or see what’s happening. But the map’s overall dark color palette does more harm than good.

Still, Gord isn’t necessarily a bad game, but rather a disappointing one. There are plenty of missed opportunities. They only scratch the surface of what other, far more interesting RTS games have accomplished. Perhaps future updates will render Gord slightly more tolerable. For now, though, there is plenty of polishing to do.