REVIEW - Siege Survival: Gloria Victis Is Fun But A Bit Repetitive
Glory be to… Victis!
By Byron Woodland
11/06/21
Reviewed on PC.
Review copy provided by Ravenscourt.
The alarm sounds and before you can begin to process what is happening people are running for their lives. The enemy is here and you join the mad dash to try and reach the keep as flaming arrows rain down around you. The town falls quickly, so quickly, and you can hear the cries of the dying all around you. People you called friends. You barely make it to the keep after moving from hiding spot to hiding spot and bar the gate behind you.
You can’t be the only one that made it can you?
Gloria Victis Siege survival is one part base building, one part survival crafting, and for those of you who are fans of This War Of Mine, the mechanics of the game will be very familiar. It does an excellent job at making you feel the desperation of the situation you find yourself in and you must work for every bit of progress.
By day you try to maintain the keep and provide supplies and equipment to the men guarding the wall. By night you sneak out into the occupied city to collect resources and recruit survivors while avoiding enemy patrols. Time and resource management is critical in this game and it may take a few playthroughs to strike that balance. Every few days the enemy mounts an attack where you must avoid siege projectiles and hope that the parts of your base that are in the open are spared and the wall holds. The outcome depends on how well you have stocked and fed the defenders of the wall and what repairs and improvements you have undertaken.
The visuals are presented in an isometric style and look good, with the cut scene animations handled nicely too. That being said, I am a bit torn on this one if I am honest. Whilst the game did nothing wrong, I came away wanting just a bit more of everything I got. I never really felt emotionally invested in the characters and the choose your own adventure style dialogue options did not help with this. Some of the moral choices I faced felt a bit forced or contrived and I feel just a bit more polish here could have really improved the narrative and made the characters more than a mechanic to be managed.
The pacing of the game is pretty good and the build during the day / scavenge during the night cycle means you are never short of things to do. I did however find it to be rather repetitive after an in game week and wanted something a bit more dynamic to break this up a little bit. The game has a single small area where you build your base and a single town where you scavenge at night. The town is quite large with various sections and would likely take more than one playthrough to fully explore and loot.
An average playthrough seems to be in the region of 6-8 hours, and there are other options that are unlocked after your first run. That being said, with the same base, map and skill trees I am not sure that I would pick the game up again, at least in it’s current state, and that’s a shame. If you enjoy this style of game and the ability to not lose a lot of time with multiple playthroughs then this is certainly not bad. For me, I found myself wanting just a bit more variety, depth and complexity.
It is worth mentioning in closing that a small dev team have put it together; I’ve haven’t come across any bugs upon release. The devs are also very responsive and receptive, and are planning to address many of my areas of concern in future updates based on the feedback they have received from the wider community. This is not something to be sneered at and I will be keeping a close eye on the progress of the game moving forward.
He has done a bang up job surviving, he has!
WORTH IT?
At the bottom of every game review, we ask the question: Worth it? And the answer is either “Yeah!” or “Nah”, followed by a comment that sums up how we feel. In order to provide more information, we also have “And” or “But”, which follows up our rating with further clarification, additional context for a game we love, or perhaps a redeeming quality for a game we didn’t like.
YEAH!
Especially if this is your preferred style of game.
BUT
Set your expectations accordingly.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
