Gord Review

ign.com:

You know all of those miserable towns you find in fantasy RPGs like The Witcher and Diablo, usually in a swamp where the locals live in a precarious balance with whatever monstrosity demands they feed it children? How do they even survive out there? That’s the idea behind Gord: A blend of roleplaying, real-time strategy, and colony simulation that should lead to making tough choices in areas like careful building, precarious combat, and tense emergent story. Instead, each of the three aspects is implemented in such a barebones way that not one of them is deeper than a quagmire or remotely entertaining. The result is about as engaging as living in a swampy, miserable town you're desperate to leave, and when you finally do and your parents ask why you never visit you tell them it's because not only is their town not fun, it has bad inventory management to boot.

Gord's set in a dark fantasy world that takes the term seriously, to the point where its sun is apparently dead. It's dark all the time, monsters haunt the wilds just outside the door, and the extended darkness is having a real effect on peoples' sanity. It's a decent enough world premise, with some neat character design and intriguing plots, but the story you actually play out is a bit of a drag. A large kingdom has nearly unified "the south" and will soon be conquering "the north," an awful blend of swamps and other such wasteland infested with monsters that no one in their right mind would want to fight over. Your job, as a representative of the southern king, is to go north and establish a relationship with one weak, unlucky local tribe so that they can serve as guides in the coming invasion. That means establishing new outposts, stockaded settlements called