Chris InglisGord is a singleplayer dark fantasy strategy game by Covenant.dev and Team17, and will launch on August 17, 2023, on Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. In Gord, we must lead the people of the Tribe of the Dawn as they venture deep into forbidden lands, and after their villages have been ravaged by wildfolk. We complete quests that shape their personalities, impact their wellbeing, and decide the fate of their community, all wrapped in a meld of survival RTS and village building mechanics.
This grim fantasy world has been inspired by Slavic folklore, and with ex-CD Projekt Red developers behind the game, their influence is clear in the world and creature designs. You could compare the setting to an isometric view of some of the swamp and marshlands out of Witcher 3, but Gord has its own art style and some unique and terrifying beasts to contend with, particularly the horrors which are large and ugly beasts with powerful attacks. To survive these wild lands, you must build up your gord (village), but to prevail, you must conquer the darkness beyond the gates.
The level of detail of the environments is fantastic, as is the sound design. The crack of thunder and rain sounded just like the real thing and the music helped set the tone and mood well. Gord’s interface is well laid out when you’re in the main game screen. There is a decent information panel on the left of the interface that shows the troops stats, items, sanity and more. On the right is a list of your active villagers where you can see their health and sanity at a glance, and the background of their portrait changes if they are low on sanity, health or have an affliction.
Not only do we need to keep our people fed and healed, but we also need to worry about their sanity. As they work beyond the safety and light of the gord, they will slowly lose sanity. This can be healed by building a meadery or finding yellow bushes in the wild. From scenario 3 we can build fireflies that are small firepits to extend light zones beyond our gates, which also helps us to spot oncoming raids sooner.
Your villagers have a starting profession such as scout, hunter or iron collector, but as we create new buildings, we can assign anyone to them, and it changes their profession. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good in that you can swap and change personnel depending on which resources you want to focus on. This can be a little cumbersome as to change them, they first need to be sent to the new building so they can swap profession, and then they will go off and start harvesting the new item.
On the flip side, once a villager is a particular profession, they will only do that thing. If you want to quickly swap them to a different resource, you need to first send them to the new resource building and then get them to work. Then there’s the situation where they run out of immediate resources they are assigned to because we haven’t scouted enough of the map around the Gord. They will just stand idle in the gord and wait for orders. Every now and then you get a voice prompt saying so and so is idle, but if you’re focused on your battle group, defending a raid or repairing buildings, you’ll not notice them just standing there.
I liked how when you go to place a building, its orientation changes depending on the outer circle placement of the gord. As you move the silhouette around the gord, the orientation of the building looks to the centre of the circular gord. You can then press Q and E to rotate it for more refined placement. However, don’t get too attached to the gord you’re currently building as when you complete one scenario, only your soldiers carry through the story.
You will need to start a new gord from scratch in every scenario which disconnected the immersion in the story a little for me. The cutscenes do a great job at connecting the story beats together, but having to start a fresh gord each scenario didn’t flow on well from scenario to scenario. In addition, you need to select which villagers you start each scenario with, and as your village numbers grow with babies being born and growing into adults, you’ll need to be more selective for who you take into successive scenarios.
In scenario two we came across a mage who unlocks incantations for us to use. Rather than controlling her as a playable character, we have a menu at the bottom to cast the incantations. This was a little strange at first as she is present in the cutscenes but not a playable character in gameplay, but I got used to it as this seems to be more about controlling and looking after a small number of villagers rather than having large armies like traditional RTS games.
Combat is real time and you can have spearmen, bow users and axe wielders that do AOE damage as they swing wildly at wolves, bears, and other creatures. Some creatures can do poison damage or make your characters bleed. When your soldiers are grouped up in a fight, it can sometimes be difficult to see their health as the sanity bar would pop up. A quick glance to the window on the right shows which unit your mouse is over but I am sure there could be a better way to represent health and sanity.
If a troop gets injured, they can heal by eating red bushes, using a life spring which gives some health regeneration for a short time, or you can run them back to town to sit in the balia (healing hut). As your resource workers move further away from the gord looking for more resources, their sanity will be affected more often. If their sanity level drops to 0, they can leave your village altogether.
When a troop loses all their life, they will be knocked down and you have 60 seconds to get someone to revive them. If you don’t make it, they will die, and this will have a negative sanity effect on anyone around the corpse. If the corpse is in or close to the gord, the game suggests moving the body to a burial ground which opens up in later scenarios. Having to balance village building and exploration with managing your small number of villagers’ sanity and hunger means it’s not just your run of the mill RTS game.
Aside from the main campaign, you can run custom scenarios where you can really tailor the experience. You can set the number of resources available to harvest, number of buildings in your gord, enemy spread, victory conditions and so on. These custom scenarios may be a preferred way of playing rather than the disjointed campaign scenarios as you can then test your resolve and see how long you can keep your gord and villagers thriving in this dark world.
Overall, Gord is a challenging strategy game with a fantastic grim fantasy setting and excellent atmosphere. There is a decent balance between resource management and combat, and the horrors are an interesting challenge to overcome, whether you choose to fight or sacrifice. Being able to switch villagers’ professions had positives and negatives, but I enjoyed the campaign scenarios. Custom scenarios might be preferred if you want longer lasting survival scenarios to test your skills.
This review utilised a key provided by Team17 and Gord will launch on August 17, 2023, on Steam ($50.95), Xbox Series X|S ($49.95) and PlayStation 5 ($47.95).
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