izigame.me

First of all this is not a 30 euro + game. I just want to get that out of the way. Second I want to point out that this game tries to be several things but it ends up being some of them but superficially so.
As far as the gameplay itself here are a few things I've noticed.
First of all, the game makes you start with the wall, that's the first building and maybe the most important. Why?
Your gord, or colony is advertised as a round settlement sorrounded by a wall, which as mentioned above, you have to place first. You can customize your wall shape to a degree that's not bad, but that brings in the need to shape your base based on the wall instead of shaping the wall to fit your base. What the logic behind that was, I'm sure I don't know, but it caused me several problems during my first games, the ones that leave a lasting impression. They could have you start with a main building and expand rather than what it is now. I'm not sure why they believed this was a good idea.
The game encourages you to have a round shaped gord, but that's the last thing you want, they might advertise the game with that setup but let me tell you none of the buildings, buildings that cannot be placed anywhere but inside the wall, are adapted for a round base, none. They could have taken a note or two from Frostpunk, both on how base expansion works and how you adapt your buildings to the shape of a base. But they didn't.
The colony part of the game is also quit a let-down. Basically you manage colonist sanity by... sending them to drink. That's it so far. You make a meadery that just lets them drink. No resources required, no preparation, just build and drink, starts out with two seats but honestly it's a meadery, you don't need seats, you need cups and booze for it to function. Health is handled pretty much in the same way, but instead of drinking to or for your health, you get a hot bath building and you can send people to sit in it and heal. Superficial in my opinion.
One of the things the community pointed out after they released their demo was how annoying the micromanagement can become due to having to constantly reassign your people from the meadery or bath back to their assigned job. It was the most popular request. It was also ignored.
The combat is pretty basic, that's not a bad thing, the villagers seem to have a level-up system that increases their abilities, such as combat, specific kinds of gathering, so you might have a guy who can fight really well do some fishing and if he runs into enemies he's gonna do fare way better againt enemies. I like that. What annoys me is that often the villagers are very slow to comply with orders. For example I'm trying to kill this big fat thing that creates area of effect damaging abilities on the ground and I use the pause system to order my troops to get out of it, they don't comply or do so slowly.
There is also an item system, things that villagers can pick up and use, usually found by exploring and looting tings like graves or chests. Most of these item I ended up leaving behind because of the tedious micromanagement that simply had me running all over the map at some point, so I stopped bothering to look for the items. And trust me once you form military units you need to focus on them doing their job as fast as possible since they drain gold and the first missions of the campaign either don't have a way to passiveley produce gold or I missed it.
The minimap is awful, I mean total crap. The only thing is useful for is to get a very basic idea where certain objectives are but otherwise I found it useless for any other aspect.
The Ui is basic, but that's not a bad thing, but that's as far as buildings are concerned, when it comes to settlers, you got several tabs that keep track of things I stopped following due to deeming them unimportant.
I like that you can take your villagers from one campaign stage to the other. That's nice. What i find very odd is that your village can multiply via recruiting people that either show up to your door or you might free them from their captors AND via birth, the weirdest birth system I've seen. I was left with 3 guys, males, they gave birth somehow. If you bother to go that way, then do it right for the love of God or just don't do it at all. The game would have worked just fine without the birth system I think.
The theme is very interesting, slavic dark fantasy and they have picked the right art for it. They also have some pretty nice lore sections to detail each of the monsters, I liked that too.
The campaign story seems nice so far, but it's hard to notice between the annoying micromanagement and the bad base building system.
They also don't seem to give a crap about player feedback, like I said, during the beta there was a very popular request they chose to ignore and myself, after pointing out that 100% of my colony children were being born exclusively african even if none of my colonists had that ethnicity well, that seems to have earned me a permanent ban on their steam forum section. How very nice of them.
Anyway, I was one of the people who looked forward to this game and I spent more time than I should have trying to give it a chance which made me unable to refund. Honestly I don't care about the money, but I do feel like wiping my ass with that money would have been a more satisfying experience than Gord as it is right now.
I do not advise people to buy this game in it's current state because given my experience with the devs and their reaction to feedback I have huge doubts about this game improving past it's current state.