I was into deserts, however ever since Kenshi I’ve change into a swamp fangirl. I additionally take into account nomadic cultures to be woefully under-represented in video games. You’d assume, then, {that a} sport a few nomadic Iron Age folks larking about in a horrible swamp can be made for me, however sadly, Gord is someway each a sport the place you may feed a toddler to a forest-dwelling horror, and a sport that is sort of uninteresting.
It is the one memorable factor that occurred, and I did it to avoid wasting time. The horrors are form of demi-gods who you often threaten you with plague except you fulfill some demand. The choice is to assault them, which the sport stresses is extraordinarily harmful. I would rationalise the selection because the lesser evil, one life sacrificed to spare the lives of a number of, however the actuality is that sending all these dudes backwards and forwards throughout the map simply seemed like an excessive amount of problem.
Gord is a real-time technique sport with a city administration layer, through which all people has a reputation, talent ranges, and traits affecting their output or making use of some circumstantial modifier. Somewhat than practice new folks, you may solely maintain the camp (gord) going till a toddler is born. It is an apparent effort to shift gamers away from the everyday RTS mindset, into one the place you worth and nurture every particular person.
However there’s little cause to. Virtually everybody can do each job, and although they achieve expertise over time, your inhabitants is just too low all through most of a sport for it to matter a lot. Virtually each occupation has the employee run out of camp to a useful resource, stand there for some time, then carry the produce again to city and repeat. Everybody’s principally doing the identical factor, and since sources run out and regenerate in every single place, you will seldom maintain monitor of the place anybody is. Employees ordered to vary duties will drop sources they’re carrying, which might solely be retrieved by the precise specialist (solely fishermen can carry fish, and so forth). That is exacerbated by a fiddly UI that makes it arduous to seek out and choose folks. There are portraits on the precise of the display, however the names are in an typically unreadable color so that you’d must undergo everybody in flip, a number of clicks apiece, simply to seek out out who’s barely sooner at mining. Clicking on a constructing reveals who works there, however no method to choose and reassign them. The villager data panel additionally totally blocks the notifications, which looks like a straightforward patch however is emblematic of what number of instances I think about numerous QA folks have been ignored by somebody two or three salaries greater.
All this provides as much as a sport about managing folks the place you will end up clicking again to the gord and grabbing whoever’s nearest as an alternative of caring who’s who. It is simply simpler, and not one of the random occasions or afflictions imbue anybody with sufficient identification to matter.
Setting up the precise huts lets villagers act as warriors, and run out into the wilds to seek out extra useful resource spots. Employees blindly run out to these if the close by ones dry up, whether or not the monsters are gone or not, so you will have your warriors systematically kill every part as they go, then run again to the gord to heal in a tub for a couple of minutes, after which repeat. And that is… principally it. Every monster sort has a particular assault, just like the gazers who leap onto your face, or little globby issues who drop poison mines, however the technique is all the time to despatched three dudes to stab them, then ship them again to city for a bit. Oh, however warriors drain your gold whereas they’re lively, so you will possibly wish to swap them again to farmers whereas they heal. Later threats would possibly require extra dudes, and periodic raids on the gord imply dragging them again house mid-exploration earlier than your villagers, who dwell in a society outlined by defensive partitions, reply to a risk by leaving the partitions. That is mounted by having 5 axe dudes as an alternative.
Gords themselves garner no affection or loyalty both, as you don’t have any significant management over the place or how giant they’re, and since area is extraordinarily restricted, most might be precisely the identical. You may construct additional ‘outpost’ gords, however solely in a set oval that may barely match one constructing. Enlargement is pricey and tedious and presents little that making extra axemen and sending them on to the target cannot do.
Villagers even have a sanity stat, which depletes once they’re in the dead of night for too lengthy, and is mounted by making them drink for some time, in precisely the identical method as therapeutic. They do not robotically search therapeutic or booze, as an alternative preferring to die or abscond, so you will often construct a campfire close to the busiest spots, and add “ship a miner to the pub” and “ship the miner again to work” to the record of chores. Villagers additionally do not return to their jobs while you ask them to construct, or give them a “transfer away from the offended wolves” order. The closest factor to any strategic thought is ready till you could have sufficient labour to help the gold mine wanted to help extra warriors (there are a number of varieties, however past archer/melee little distinction between them, particularly as every requires further buildings you will not have area for). And when you do have sufficient miners, you would possibly as effectively simply pressgang them, since you’ll find gold by killing monsters and/or promoting the wooden that is spilling out of your shops anyway.
There’s so much I have never talked about, like how every map is plagued by little looty issues to click on on (a pixel hunt barely definitely worth the effort), often producing magic gadgets that do not change something about what you are doing. There is a magic system too, in which you’ll construct a temple and have folks pray, producing ‘religion’ that powers spells I solely bothered with when a digger walked right into a bear and wanted to run sooner. The temple is gigantic, and occupies labourers for a function that might be served sooner by simply sending extra dudes.
The much-vaunted Horrors, in the meantime, present up on some ranges, and demand some tedious chore or, when you’re fortunate, a toddler sacrifice that you will do exactly to get the extent over with sooner. The extra I write about Gord, the extra uninteresting and underwhelming it feels to really play subsequent to its detailed and moody cutscenes. Itemizing extra of its particulars and options is beginning to really feel like one other chore as a result of it means explaining how half baked and inconsequential most of them are. It is certainly not dangerous, however it’s a disappointing sport that fails to seize the enchantment of any of its element genres, and fails to generate something attention-grabbing by combining them.
