Gord Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Gord takes place in a grim fantasy world. You know this because the game goes out of its way to tell you all the time, whist being as dark and unpleasant as possible from the very beginning. Barely ten minutes into the game and the player must sacrifice a child to some big evil grotesque demon thing. The attempt to force the player to make a difficult decision is immediately undermined by the fact that the child in question joined your retinue a matter of minutes ago, robbing the scenario of any emotional impact. Instead, the player is just left with an unpleasant taste in their mouth as the child is gorily gobbled up by said demon. It’s absolutely unnecessary. In fact, the attempts to shock the player fall flat throughout the game and only serve to undermine what is otherwise a solid real-time strategy survival title.

Unlike many real-time strategy games, Gord does not tell its story from the point of view of several warring factions, whilst casting the player as general of a variety of armies. Here the player focuses their time on just one group, The Tribe of the Dawn. The tribe is on a quest to forge into the dark and grim unknown, and it’s up to you to ensure their survival. You’ll do this in the standard way; gathering resources to build up your village or, to use Tribe of the Dawn lingo, Gord. There is wood to chop, reeds to gather, mushrooms to pick – you get the idea. Rather than having to build individual ‘Mushroom Pickers’ and ‘Reed Gathers’ and what have you, you instead assign different jobs to your small rag-tag gang of tribespeople. It’s a neat touch to attempt to create a bond with your tribe – each avatar can even be named – but in reality, this relationship is never forged; you end up with so many