Gord

Don’t try to tell me that video games are not educational. For example, from playing Gord I learned that a gord is a Slavic medieval settlement, a small cluster of buildings surrounded by a wall. The game also taught me that, as the British say, I would be rubbish at surviving the terrors of a monster-filled medieval night.

Gord won't be for everyone, but its dark tone and high difficulty are worth working through for the top-notch world-building on display here.

Gord isn’t the deepest of city builders, and its campaign can sometimes feel like an extended tutorial, but nevertheless, it provides an engaging mix of city building and exploration. With its sanity system and pesky Horrors that need to be dealt with, there’s not much else like this around. Jump into its Custom Scenario mode with both feet, and you’ll likely a find a game that will eat up hours of your time.

Gord is an impressive marriage of base building, adventuring and storytelling across a ruined world fraught with horrors from Slavic folklore. Though it's more than a little rough around the edges, such issues aren't enough to considerably tarnish the uniqueness of what developer Covenant.net has wrought here.

It feels like the initial announcement of Gord had happened nearly half a decade ago. Maybe it’s just my post-pandemic brain blurring the concept of time as we know it, but I’ve been keeping an eye on this game for a while. Why wouldn’t I? I love me a good strategy game, so having the opportunity to play one that also mixed in some darker themes and Slavic mythology, all while being supervised by former Witcher devs was something to be excited about.

Personally, I found the ‘grim’ nature of Gord just too nasty, the developers often shocking for the sake of it, rather than doing so to support the story or gameplay. Still, there’s a lot to admire about Covenant’s creation, with the game offering a compelling and tense survival RTS experience. Only really worth picking up on PC, mind.

For all the interesting and novel things that Gord brings to the city building genre, it's just not coherent nor determined enough in what it's trying to do to create something with the necessary confidence to compete with the countless options available to genre fans these days. The result is a game with a strong start and a compelling world, but one that cannot build upon those strengths to retain interest over each new settlement and its repetitive gameplay.

Gord is a colony management and survival game in a grim fantasy world. Is it worth your while?

Don't sacrifice your time to this mediocre survival strategy game.

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