Gord

Gord is, in its most outstanding moments, a mediocre colony sim/RTS/RPG hybrid. The rest is just boring.

Beyond the shock value of its demonic horrors, this survivalist city-builder has little to recommend it.

"It's all very grotty, and that's meant fully as a compliment."

A detailed and moody setting wasted on a dull and repetitive RTS/management hybrid with the strengths of neither genre.

Gord is an interesting and, at times, good, albeit flawed, survival city-builder mixed with action RPG and strategy elements. The atmosphere is excellently done, but this is countered by the sanity mechanics taking too much from the rest of the game. Almost every positive has a negative. The character development mechanics bring a fundamentally broken inventory system. The excellent monster development introduces a few that are just outright broken. The (sometimes) interesting campaign brings a near-opaque element of worldbuilding, requiring much side-reading as names are unceremoniously thrown at you. All in all, Gord isn't a bad game, and while I can have a decent time of it, there are too many flaws to recommend it universally; hardcore strategy fans may apply.

Gord attempts to combine strategy, survival and town-building into one package with a particularly… terrifying style. Inspired by Slavic mythology and reality, it invites players to see a very ugly side of people, when survival comes first.

Innovative adventure strategy, especially adventure, which has an interesting approach, atmosphere and folklore. But in practice, the gameplay is quite cumbersome, unbalanced, and after a few hours you will find that it is also sterile and brings only limited fun. What starts out as a promising settlement management quickly turns into a routine with limited construction and lifeless wandering in the forest.

Gord could have been better than Frostpunk, but right now it’s barely even “punk.” It’s a base-building survival strategy game with enormous potential, featuring an amazing story, easy controls, and a great soundtrack. But then it gets mixed up with clunky AI, terrible management, a weird ending, and a ton of weird “Gord-ing” (constantly building new forts), and the result is a mishmash I just can’t appreciate. The game is just a little bit short of being amazing, but that little bit went somewhere completely different than it should have, and that’s what I regret about Gord.

Nice setting and premise mostly wasted on a game that would have needed more development time and refinement to fulfill its potential.

Gord’s ambition is as vast as the dark fantasy world it portrays, but unfortunately, its execution falls short of the mark.