It takes a village to raise a child they say, but what about one person to raise a village? That’s what awaits players in Covenant and Team 17’s adventure strategy Gord. Inspired by Slavic Folklore, how did this strategy game with horror elements fair? I would like to thank Team 17 and Covenant for the reviewing opportunity.
Gord casts players in the role of the Steward representing the King as they help a group of nomadic villagers called the Tribe of the Dawn, led by the elder Boghdan, and establish Gords in the untamed wilds where dark forces, wildmen, and unknown horrors await. Along on your journey are the king’s emissary and a mysterious witch named Lynx.
Now onto the game itself. Gord‘s controls at first may be a bit odd to players using controllers but after a while, you get pretty used to them, at the time of writing this I have not discovered a hotkey that will allow me to snap the camera back to the Gord, which I wish there is a button that would allow that as it can be a pain having to move the camera around all over the map. The game’s sound and music are pretty good with excellent voice acting. I really like that when you find collectible scrolls that tell folklore, they’re voiced over as well, which is good because I don’t know if it’s me or my screen but it seems the text is small and difficult to read.
When it comes to gameplay, you should know that even “Casual” is difficult. Gord is a real-time strategy where you tell the villagers what to do by assigning them jobs, building structures, explore. You have to watch both their physical and mental health. If one of your villager’s mental health goes too low, they’ll attack other villagers and eventually flee the Gord in terror. The best strategy I can offer as it worked for me, is to pause time often to check on you’re villager’s health and to assign work as things can go from Zero to “crap, Crap, CRAP!” quickly.
There are two modes you can play, the main story and a creative mode where you can adjust all parameters of the game to your choosing, honestly I found the creative mode to be more fun than the main campaign.
A couple of technical issues I’ve noticed with the game come with the graphics during cinematic scenes. At the start of the game the audio and video stutter, and during in-game cinematic there’s this bright flashes of color at the bottom of the screen. I’ve seen something like this before in other games but not as bright and in your face as this.
Overall, I enjoyed playing Gord. As mentioned above, I’ve found the creative mode more enjoyable, that’s just me, but if you like a challenge with survival strategy, Gord is for you because as mentioned before, even casual (easy) is difficult. The minor graphical glitches with cinematics, difficult text, and lack of certain hotkeys, affect the total score lightly as the gameplay, player choices (that affect events in the game), and creative mode help the game score decent.
On my scale of 1-10, Gord is an 8.
Gord will be coming out on August 17th for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
