Grimgrad is a complex city-building strategy game in which not only diseases, hunger and thirst will spoil your life, but also the wrath of the Slavic gods. The game tries to be the best version of Banished, but it does not quite succeed – I tell you why in the review.
Developer: Juvty Worlds
Publisher: Juvty Worlds
Release date: April 5, 2023
Historically, games based on mythology often turn to either the Greek or Scandinavian setting – but the equally rich Slavic is bypassed. The last thing that comes to mind on this topic is the Black Book card game, which is a success even among those who have heard about Baba Yaga for the first time. Therefore, Grimgrad, a strategy game based on Slavic myths, is more interesting than other Banished imitators.
The game meets with a gloomy text introduction – we learn about the village, burned to the ground by the followers of the gods. Only the youth Jaromir manages to escape, and that is thanks to the god Semargl, a fiery dog with wings. Now the hero has to rebuild his village, protect the people and find allies along with an unusual mentor.
This is what we will be doing in the single player campaign, which consists of five chapters. In fact, this is a training seasoned with a plot – with each subsequent chapter, more gameplay opportunities open up, the game itself becomes more difficult. The second mode is endless survival without specific goals.
I liked that the campaign, although it is a training, but it has a plot – Jaromir travels the world, meets new heroes and gods, overcomes difficulties. His adventures are accompanied by text inserts, which makes the game reminiscent of old text-based RPGs, but without the possibility of choosing dialogues. The history is saturated with Slavic life and atmosphere, which is impossible not to appreciate.
In terms of gameplay, Grimgrad is a medieval city-building strategy game with a focus on hardcore management. There is no combat system here, instead of bearded nomads, hunger, disease, thirst, fires and angry gods will bring trouble, and the latter do not have physical incarnations.
Each mission begins with the construction of a village. There is nothing unusual here: we build, lay paths, erect resource buildings and expand. Only the buildings themselves are surprising: there is a burial place where sewage from buildings is piled to eliminate the risk of disease, a barber’s shop and even a squad post, with which you can regulate the flow of people.
With progress, other buildings will open – a weaving workshop, a honey factory, a tile factory … As a result, a run-down village will gradually turn into a pleasant medieval town, and the buildings are updated automatically, depending on the level of contentment of the population.
By the way, about the flow of people – with the growth of the settlement, the streets will be filled with hurrying citizens, and they move chaotically and not very logically. You cannot directly control them: you will have to optimize their paths only with the help of squad posts. Not the most convenient mechanic, I never used it in full.
In general, people in Grimgrad are just dummies. An individual person, as in Banished, cannot be hired, you cannot view information about him. All we can do is to prioritize work between food, logistics, production and service, and the system itself will distribute people between buildings. We lose the lion’s share of control and in moments of chaos, we hope that the system will properly distribute people to buildings.
The consequences of indirect control are felt during illnesses, fires or thirst. In Grimgrad, these are simply numbers that need to be maintained through the construction of new buildings. These mechanics do not have any game depth, they simply force us to build more or redistribute human resources.
When everything is bad, you nervously think that people will die, the village will burn down and the defeat screen will appear. But no. The population decreases because the level of residential buildings automatically decreases, but when the problems are fixed, it increases again – that’s all that happens. These changes take place literally in a second, you don’t even have time to understand what happened – and after a while you don’t pay attention to it at all.
As for the mechanics of the deities, it also turned out to be undeveloped. If the gods do not like something, they simply send negative effects to the settlement – they reduce productivity, increase thirst, provoke an increase in disease. The gameplay, although it becomes more difficult, but these difficulties feel artificial, and each god has the same scenario of punishments. All that is required of us is simply to erect totems, and then we can forget about the gods.
There are also random events in Grimgrad, but they rarely appear, and I also didn’t feel the depth in them. For example, forest rangers will hear a child crying in the forest – there is a choice to go to the forest or ignore the event. In the first case, the foresters will be ambushed and lose 10 firewood – similar punishments (or rewards) await in other events, and … that’s it.
As for the technical condition, Grimgrad turned out to be beautiful, but demanding. The picture is realistic, detailed and sometimes gloomy, for which the developers want to be praised.
However, the interface turned out to be inconvenient: the tabs are not hidden after interacting with the screen, they have to be closed manually. The indicators on the screen are updated with a delay, and in the single player campaign I encountered a critical bug due to which I could not go beyond the fourth chapter. The technical state of Grimgrad is more disappointing than encouraging.
Grimgrad meets with an interesting Slavic setting, story and gameplay that promises to challenge. But in the end, the gameplay quickly becomes monotonous, you don’t feel depth in the gameplay mechanics, and the problem with optimization, inconvenient interface and other technical flaws cause melancholy after a couple of hours of passage, and here no Slavic mythology will help.
Reader Rating0 Votes
0
pros
Slavic setting
Gameplay features to match the setting
There is a plot
nice picture
Minuses
There is no depth in gameplay mechanics
Gameplay quickly becomes monotonous
Indirect unit control
Few modes
Inconvenient interface
There are critical bugs
