Gord review: Great ideas, poor execution

Gord is a new dark fantasy real-time strategy with elements of city building and adventure. It's a debut title from Covenant studio, founded by former Frostpunk and The Witcher developers and I had a chance to review it over the last week or so.

Having played through the campaign missions and a couple of custom scenarios, I've discovered that there is a good game in Gord somewhere beneath all the tedious mechanics that only take away the fun from the player.

Gord won't be the game that scratches that Frostpunk itch, as it tries to offer too much of everything while failing to make any of that feel polished or genuinely interesting. 

AltChar

Gord features a campaign that includes ten scenarios as well as custom scenario builder

STORY

Gord features a story campaign and a custom scenario mode. The campaign is pretty straightforward with around ten missions, and it's more like a lengthy tutorial to help you understand all the mechanics of the game. There is a story in Gord, albeit a pretty weak one.

You play as the steward of the conquering king, who is set to invade the north, which is filled with horrors and monstrosities but also gold that he desperately needs to pay his soldiers. Your mission in this part of the world is to establish a gold route with the help of local tribes before the king's army arrives. 

You'll build the gords across these swampy lands, and fight off the bandits and all sorts of creatures while trying to protect those gold mines for your king. The campaign introduces several characters with full voiceover and cinematics but these are quite underwhelming as the voice acting is average while the cinematics and animations are nothing special either.

But since this is a strategy game, I don't think it's fair to overly criticise Gord for its story and narrative. So let's dive into mechanics that are arguably more important for an RTS.

AltChar

Gord has seasons and weather effects and I've found winter to be the most visually appealing one

GAMEPLAY

Before every scenario, you'll get a chance to choose the settlers for your Gord. The key is to look at their stats, strengths and weaknesses. This will allow you to carefully select your group of settlers for every role and have the highest productivity once the game starts.

The city building is fairly simple. Near your Gord, you'll find materials like wood, reed and clay, which are needed to construct and upgrade the buildings in your Gord. Additionally, to feed your citizens, fishing and hunting comes in handy, at least until you unlock other buildings like wheat farm later on. 

You'd argue that resource collection and management is something that should be fairly easy to implement in a RTS but that's not the case here. One of the most frustrating things about Gord is how the game handles the loop of collecting these materials. 

Once you build, let's say a lumberyard, you need to assign settlers to that building so they can start collecting wood, a concept we've seen in other strategy games. Usually, you'd go for settlers with high woodcutting skills as you don't want to waste your warriors or miners on woodcutting or mushroom harvesting. 

Once you choose your perfect lumberjacks, you can set the building to auto or manual collection. So for example, when set to auto, gold miners will automatically search for nearby piles of gold to mine. If there are no gold ores in close vicinity, your miners will then travel large distances to find gold, which always results in them being attacked by wildlife or enemy factions. 

AltChar

Every villager in Gord has its strengths and weaknesses. As they work, their skills will increase

On Manual, it's up to you to pick a spot for them on the map with plenty of resources. But the issue with this option is that all these materials are harvested in a matter of minutes, so you have this constant loop of setting manual gathering spots, instead of focusing on more important matters.

You're probably thinking that villagers being attacked is a concept as old as RTS games themselves. And yes, you'd be right. But the catch is that Gord has one of the worst mini maps and UI I've ever seen in a strategy game, so by the time you realise which one of your settlers is being attacked and where, they will be severely injured or even worse, dead. 

Gord has three ways of telling you if your settler is injured, losing their mind or being attacked and none of them is perfect. The first is the notifications in the top left corner, which spam more than a Nigerian prince who wants to give you half of his fortune. 

Then, right side of the screen, you have icons of each settler with their health and sanity bars but the graphical effects used to show their state are too subtle and you'll simply get lost trying to find the settler who needs your help.

Lastly, the minimap, which should serve as your quick access to various outposts and settlers, is extremely hard to use and doesn't help one bit in navigating the large swamplands as it fails to have a clear colour scheme to tell you where your Gord, warriors or villagers are.

AltChar

Horrors in Gord are powerful creatures that are extremely difficult to kill so your best bet is to make them happy by offering various sacrifices

Finding my scout team in a distant part of the map or a villager working in an outpost far from the gord was truly a bigger nightmare than the horrors that are found across this Slavic world. Speaking about the horrors, other than some great lore and genuinely interesting concept, they too are as shallow as the swamps in which they reside. 

Horrors are usually these large god-like monsters that appear on certain spots on the map. While the concept of having these monsters affecting your people's sanity is an interesting one, the execution is quite lame. Gord uses horrors only to make your life more miserable as these god-like creatures will often require challenging sacrifices to leave you alone. 

Fail to satisfy them, and you'll pay a dire price as they can make your villagers lose their sanity or even feast on them. There is absolutely no fun to be had with giving away precious resources or your people (yes, these beasts will often require human sacrifice) to horrors. It's time-consuming and distracting, requiring you to juggle between horrors' demands, raids, your people's needs, exploring the world for new resources, side quests, big decisions that you need to make and so on. 

AltChar

Combat in Gord is fairly simple, you right click on the enemy and that's about it.

Most of the time, I've felt that Gord simply throws so much at you that it completely loses that fun part of building your settlement and taking care of your settlers. The campaign is the worst example of this, as it won't allow you to play at your own pace, giving you quests, spawning bandit attacks and other annoying things like a travelling mage cursing your people if you refuse to meet his demands.

This is a reoccurring scenario in Gord and the one that breaks the gameplay loop too often, taking away your precious resources and giving you more trouble, even though you already have your hands full.

Once you get enough resources and construct basic buildings, you will be able to start creating warriors for your Gord, be it archers, spearmen or axemen. You won't need an overly large army as three of your warriors will be able to outgun five standard bandits or a pack of wolves. 

With the help of incantations that you can cast if you have enough faith, these encounters become even easier. I've found that spamming the Daze spell works great as the enemies become pretty much unable to attack you for a good five to ten seconds, which is more than enough to wipe out the entire group. 

Horrors, on the other hand, are almost unbeatable and your best bet is to listen to their demands, build statues, bring materials and make sacrifices if you want to keep your people alive and sane and your Gord growing.

AltChar

Every now and then, a child will be born in your gord. You can assign the child to help out the seniors until it's old enough to work on its own

CONCLUSION

To be completely honest, the whole idea of Gord is interesting on paper. The dev team had some genuinely interesting concepts here. Building your Gord while exploring the world in adventure style and satisfying the horrors is unique and could have led to some engaging gameplay. Sadly, it doesn't really work well. Gord simply has too many problems - from its ridiculous UI to frustrating controls and lame resource gathering loop, Gord is just too frustrating at times and offers very little fun.

As a huge fan of Frostpunk, I was initially excited by the concept and certain ideas that the dev team talked about before launch but after spending some time with this title, I can only say that Gord failed to offer the same amount of fun and unique experience that the game it takes heavy inspiration from did.