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Gord review: fertile ground covered in stagnant water, also swampsSwamp and circumstance of inglorious bore
Swamp and circumstance of inglorious bore
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Team17
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Team17
I used to be into deserts, but ever sinceKenshiI have become a swamp fangirl. I also consider nomadic cultures to be woefully under-represented in games. You’d think, then, that a game about a nomadic Iron Age people larking about in a horrible swamp would be made for me, but unfortunately,Gordis somehow both a game where you can feed a child to a forest-dwelling horror, and a game that’s kind of dull.
It’s the only memorable thing that happened, and I did it to save time. The horrors are sort of demi-gods who you occasionally threaten you with plague unless you satisfy some demand. The alternative is to attack them, which the game stresses is extremely dangerous. I might rationalise the choice as the lesser evil, one life sacrificed to spare the lives of several, but the reality is that sending all those dudes back and forth across the map just sounded like too much hassle.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Team17
Gord is a real-timestrategy gamewith a townmanagementlayer, in which everybody has a name, skill levels, and traits affecting their output or applying some circumstantial modifier. Rather than train new people, you can only keep the camp (gord) going until a child is born. It’s an obvious effort to shift players away from the typical RTS mindset, into one where you value and nurture each person.
All this adds up to a game about managing people where you’ll find yourself clicking back to the gord and grabbing whoever’s nearest instead of caring who’s who. It’s just easier, and none of the random events or afflictions imbue anyone with enough identity to matter.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Team17
Gords themselves garner no affection or loyalty either, as you have no meaningful control over where or how large they are, and since space is extremely limited, most will be exactly the same. You can build extra ‘outpost’ gords, but only in a fixed oval that can barely fit one building. Expansion is expensive and tedious and offers little that making more axemen and sending them directly to the objective can’t do.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Team17
