GORSD makes an absolutely blinding first impression with its wacky and trippy visuals. A bizarre masked God-like snake quartet teaches you how to play the game before you are let loose into the game itself. From there, GORSD continues to surprise with its a quirky game mechanics that make both its single-player and multiplayer modes excellent fun.
Each level of GORSD has one common goal in mind. You play as a character who leaves a trail of their colour behind them and the idea is to cover the map of the level in your colour. The problem is – so is everyone else on the map! Often you are aiming for total domination to then win but how you do it is down to a combination of quick thinking skill, timing and strategy. You see every single person on the map has one single bullet and when you fire it, it will carry on down a path and bounce around for about 10 seconds before it stops. When you shoot the bullet you can tell it to either go straight ahead and rebound, turn left at every junction or turn right. Every map is full of lots of various sized squares. Cue the ensuing chaos as you bend your bullet whilst trying to dodge everyone else!
Whilst you’ll have plenty of strategies trying to run and gun others as well as hiding from them too, the way how kills work in the game is inspired. Each time you are killed, your respawn time gets longer, meaning your opponents have more time on the map to paint more of it with their blood (I assume). Each time someone shoots a player successfully, there is a splash outward of your colour from the body and that too gets bigger with each kill you get. This means that early in a battle, it can feel that you are just taking points from each other and staying relatively even but it soon mounts up and eventually if you aren’t already going to win, you’ll be able to get that final kill that totally covers the map. This stops battles ever getting stale as you try to play hide and sneak. The map layouts also put pay to this too as you are never truly that far away from your opponents.
There are a huge variety of maps and they start to introduce, gaps, gates, laser beams and traps that will punish the unwary. There are also bullet swallowers too that can help turn the tide if you are being hunted down. When it comes to game modes, GORSD brings plenty too. Outside of the domination mode where you have to paint all the map your colour, there is deathmatch, an area collection mode, a hunter/hunted mode and unlockable battle mode. You can change lots of parameters within these modes too so that your experience is customisable.
What I also appreciated was how great the single-player experience was too. This sees you travel around a ruin completing variants of the above modes and many more, including a furious time trial puzzle mode where your bullet can also paint the map, which had me raging. When you do badly against the single-player levels, you can opt for easy mode but the game turns you into a bloody worm that slinks around the screen. I will be honest, I’ve spent most of my time as the worm… Boss battles add even more drama to the mix as you have to get a total domination in a level to then attack the boss and when you do, the map morphs to a new stage for you to continue the battle. Phew.
If I were to have one word of caution it is that GORSD takes a good 20-30 minutes to really get settled with. It is the kind of game that has the potential to a mainstay local multiplayer favourite – but you need to learn it a little first. Its was the same with Towerfall when that first came out because if you had one person who got it and loads that didn’t, it was wildly unbalanced. GORSD is the same and it is down to the bullet control mechanic. You need to know what you are doing or you’ll just shoot yourself dead over and over instead of aiming it or catching you bullet back. After I got past that initial 20-minute learning curve, I fell in love with it and I think many more players should take the punt and they’ll feel the same. If you’ve got mates who will put in the time, bump this score up a point.
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Review copy provided by developer.
