Gord

"Summer don't know me no more

He got mad, tiresome"

 

Gorillaz - El Manana

 

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Hey I've heard of gords, who says I haven't? 'Course, I learned it from another video game, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but still, I want my damn applause. Anyway: Gord (it means a voled willage) is yet another example of how thoroughly Settlers-inspired village simulators have taken over the city sim market after Banished. It's also one of the rare times even I regret having to "thumbs-down" an otherwise impressively detailed and devoted work. Correct elements are mostly present, but they fail to coalesce into a viable whole.

Mead, a sanity meter, a thriving economy and bathing beauties. Sound like a party?

So Gord's a village simulator set in Slavic mythology, thankfully not reiterating the same elves and dragons and fireballs as everyone else. It also benefits from some inspired themes like an Apocalyptic curse of eternal night. (But how do the plants grow, daddy? Kid, I just live here, don't ask me.) Villagers vary in stats and special abilities, level up their skills while working or exploring and can equip items tailored to many specialties. As in the Age of Wonders series, exploration is a rewarding and dangerous enterprise, especially as basic resource nodes respawn but advanced ones don't (though that can also be mitigated by trading.) Villager bonuses and penalties range in magnitude, a weakness vs. a specific monster type may never incenvenience you, or on the flip-side sanity recovery after completing a quest you'll only run across once in your playthrough, all the way up to universally useful movespeed or sanity bonuses. It probably says something about this game's bleak slavic tone that "grumpy" is one of your most fearsome weaknesses.

Great. Love me sum all of that.

A highly thorough Civilopedia explains most concepts, though there you're already running into some weird choices -

You don't need to lore-dump the harmlessness of bunnies on me

- like exhaustive explanations of "critters" and "creeps" which have needed no introduction since Warcraft 2-3. I initially started in on the campaign, but it progresses rather tediously through a suite of stock characters with no further personality, and forcing you to rebuild your gord and level it up through construction requirements every time even in the tutorial stages smacks of timesink. It does also make the minor mistake of lore-dumping much of the mythology on you right from the start, spewing god names left and right, instead of gradually easing an unfamiliar audience into such rarely trod material. And, while the voice acting isn't bad, it's still banal enough for me not to bother.

Luckily, Gord features a surprisingly robust (on par with Old World or other 4Xes) map/scenario generator, so I was able to... mostly... enjoy a few freeplay maps... halfway through. Because after the initial "wow" factor of diving into a complex and meaningful construction/economic/expansion system, you start running into everything preventing that system's proper functioning. Start with an interface both stunningly complex and littered with weird gaps.

- apparently the only building you can't dismantle is the palisade, despite the fact you build a second wall out from the first one and if you're not expanding from a wall with a pre-existing gate, your villagers have to exit and re-enter, and the old wall choke-points civilian traffic pernanently... and nearby constructions can block gate placement

- military units not auto-separated from workers in roster

- while it does have CTRL+# action groups, you can't SHIFT+ to add another unit to them, have to mouse-click your way through three separate panels

- items beg for a storehouse of their own instead of clumsily shuffling between individuals

- I can appreciate you being inspired by 11bit's excellent work, but that sooty full-screen pop-up transition effect which worked so well in Frostpunk is ineffectively overextended here to annoyingly black out your screen altogether

- trying quite hard for the "relaxing" tag with a fast forward mode not quite fast enough

Then there are the weird thematic choices. If you're playing up the slavic theme why not stick with it?

- clay from termite mounds? Europe's northern half is one of the few places in the world which doesn't (yet) have termite problems

- slavs fighting gators and monkeys?

- some of the randomized names sound more germanic than slavic/gothic. Yes, there's plenty of overlap there, but also plenty of non-overlap you're not using.

 

Then you've got the rage-quit-inducing bugs and design insanity:

- don't color-code shit if you're playing up the grayscale night-time theme! Squinting is not a tactical choice
- AI is fundamentally pretty good (far more thorough than some competitors like Dawn of Man) with each villager running from combat when wounded, constructing anything in range or boosting its sanity/health if it drops, and settings for these and other behaviors like gathering range... but it's also inconsistent in resuming behaviors and tends to idle after orders, making you micromanage far more than you should have to

- villagers sometimes fail to stop running before their objective, so end up running in circles around it

- anguished villager never breaks out of anguish, stands in one place permanently (and you can start with as few as five)

- a good old-fashioned fatal program lock-up

- villagers can spawn with self-defeating bonuses or penalties, like a 15% attack angle bonus paired with complete inability to fight

- wall placement after your initial gord is painfully wonky, refusing to move individual nodes due to narrow angles even though it's only the final pattern which matters, plus the "wrong length for wall section"... does that mean too long, too short, too pineapple, what? And sometimes of course it just refuses to place a node in a certain spot with no explanation. So there. Suck on it.

- you'll see the inexplicable "unable to build here" message when trying to place anything in your expansions. As far as I can tell you not only have to avoid overlapping building placement with trees, which would be tedious micromanagement (why not auto-chop as part of the build order?) but might make some sense. No, you cannot build ANYTHING in any gord extension which contains AT LEAST ONE TREE anywhere in it. Why? Fuck if I know! And did I mention trees re-grow? (In the dark, daddy? Go 'way kid, ya bother me.)

- nonsensical or luck-based quest requirements. Getting a quest to visit a dangerous area right at the start of the game when it's literally impossible to defeat the defending mobs even if you send all your villagers. Later on, Rusalka demands "undeposited" resources which you've never put into storage (there is some support for this in European folklore where creatures often require untainted or untouched resources; it may be where "cold iron" comes from) but come on, I had not a single iron node in the 2/3 an XL map I scouted and so autofailed the quest. What exactly am I being graded on here?

Pity. This could've been something great.

Maybe in a couple of years I'll check back to discover Gord will have miraculously fixed all these flaws, but I'm not holding my breath, given they already cranked out an expansion pack without bothering to fix anything.

"Maybe in time you'll want to be mine"