Developer: Black Eye Games & FishTankStudio
Publisher: Ravenscourt
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Siege Survival: Gloria Victis – Review
Siege Survival: Gloria Victis is a challenging survival game with a similar concept as This War of Mine, but instead set in a medieval setting; focusing on civilians who are trying to survive within a city under siege. This opens up several interesting forms of gameplay; base building, resource management, but also stealth missions, all combined within one overarching theme. This game has been developed by Black Eye Games & FishTankStudio and is published by Ravenscourt.
Story
Siege Survival: Gloria Victis tells the story about a much-overlooked part of warfare: the common people. The game starts with a cinematic, showing a merciless band of Vikings attacking a city, slaughtering all who stand in their way.
After the cinematic ends with a fearsome warrior slaughtering a defenseless wounded soldier who tried to crawl to safety, a dialogue box will pop up to tell the rest of the story. In this text-based introduction, you are able to make some choices, which will affect the number of resources and soldiers you’ll start out with. These dialogues will pop up more often as you explore the city as you’ll meet people or find useful locations, and you can decide how to interact with them; possibly leading to new recruits for your camp of survivors, or resulting in dangerous situations, leaving our character mortally wounded.
The Story of Siege Survival is rather grim, as you would expect from a setting like this. It revolves around a small group of citizens; the few survivors of a brutal attack on your city, and the entire city is taken over by the enemy except for the castle in which you are struggling to survive. You need to keep yourself alive, but also take care of the few people you’ll encounter while exploring. All these people come with a story, where you’ll have to help them or save them, hopefully leading to them joining your group of survivors. You’ll need to make some tough choices along the way. The resources you have are scarce, and you won’t be able to keep everyone happy or act like a hero.
The story is mainly told via dialogue pop-ups, but these serve well to convey the grim setting. They show the horrendous personal stories of the main victims of any war: the civilians.
Graphics
The graphics are rather simple, but adequate. The color palette is rather grim with muted colors in mostly browns and greys, which are fitting for a dark medieval setting and the harsh setting of the game.
You’ll have an isometric view of the city; giving you a good view of your settlement during the day, and the city streets during the night. You’ll be able to zoom in to view everything in more detail, which is a nice feature but not something you’ll use often.
The events you can trigger throughout the city feature a short story, accompanied by pretty line drawings of the objects or people you’ll interact with. This is a nice feature, which sets the tone of the encounter. Also, the character portraits are nicely drawn.
Sound
This game does feature a nice but melancholic soundtrack. The music fits the dark medieval atmosphere; having you focus on the deserted, ransacked city, and the feeling of loneliness and despair. Siege attacks will be accompanied by powerful battle music, making them feel even more stressful and intimidating. The actions of the characters and the UI have fitting sound effects. Story events aren’t narrated, but this is fine since they are presented as if you are reading a book.
Gameplay
Siege Survival: Gloria Victis is a survival game, focused on crafting and settlement development during the day, and stealth exploration during the night. Strategic resource management is key.
During the daytime, you’ll mostly be busy with your camp within the relative safety of the walls of the keep. Here you can buy all kinds of crafting stations, you have some livestock to take care of, and the survivors you’ll find and recruit will be stationed here. Within the walls, there’s a small safe zone where you can build your structures that will not be hit by the enemy’s bombardments, but the largest area is unsafe, and structures built here will be occasionally damaged by projectile attacks from the enemy. Most projectiles will just damage or destroy things or start fires, but some (dead animals) are noxious and will make your characters sick. You’ll need to invest precious resources in repairing the damage from these attacks. Luckily, you will be able to scavenge a few leftover resources after these attacks. Deciding which crafting stations should be placed into the safe zone is an interesting challenge, which fits well within the theme of this game.
You’ll find survivors while exploring, and there is a maximum of four you’ll be able to recruit to your camp. The characters will all have different traits. for example, the character you start out with has more inventory space and will thus be very useful to gather resources at night. Other characters might be stronger so they can fight, or are good at haggling at the places where you can trade resources. You can assign tasks to all characters, like crafting or building during the day and scavenging during the night. You’ll also need to let them rest, eat and drink sufficiently; not only to keep them alive but also to enable them to work as efficiently as possible. Generally, you’ll let characters work and rest in shifts, so sometimes you’ll not have the right character available for the job when you need them. Then you’ll need to adjust your plans accordingly, to make efficient use of your available characters’ skills, and still collect what you need most.
Under the cover of darkness, you will be able to venture out into the ruins of the city and scavenge for precious resources. First, you’ll explore the area closest to the camp, which is relatively safe. As you explore, you’ll encounter several events, allowing you to collect more resources, recruit survivors, trade, or unlock other parts of the city. But as you explore further into the city, you’ll often encounter nightly patrols of the enemy, and you’ll need to keep out of sight to stay safe. If you are spotted, you’ll need to get back to safety fast. You have to remember the fastest routes to escape tunnels, so you’ll be able to escape guards before they catch you. Also, you need to remember to return timely before sunrise, because in daylight you’ll be sure to be spotted. Although this is a great concept to make scavenging feel dangerous and challenging, the mechanics are very simple, and you’ll be able to pass right behind a guard as long as you keep out of their lines of sight.
This all sounds very overwhelming, like a constant uphill battle, and in a sense, this is exactly the essence of the game. However, you will be able to fight back, although the battle will play out mostly off-screen; fought by soldiers, not by your villagers. At the beginning of the game, you learn that there are some soldiers who did survive the devastating raid of the enemy, and they will help to defend your stronghold and hopefully keep the enemy at bay. Of course, you do need to invest precious resources for these soldiers, like food, arrows, weapons, and armor. Besides that, you also have a trebuchet within your camp, which you can repair and use to launch projectiles towards the enemy forces to ward them off, and slowly turn the tide of battle.
Whatever you do, you’ll find you’re always short on resources. Upgrading crafting stations will make crafting much more efficient, but you’ll also need to build new crafting stations, in order to unlock new things to craft which you need for your camp and survivors. You’ll have to be prepared to make some tough choices. Will you use your food for your hungry group of survivors? Will you use it to keep your livestock alive, so that they can produce more food and resources, such as fresh eggs? Or do you want to feed the soldiers who are standing between you and an overwhelming enemy force? All these items will pop up at a certain point throughout your playthrough. When starting out, you’ll have to be careful not to make the wrong choices regarding the allocation of your resources, because then you’ll struggle to survive and will eventually most likely lose the game and have to start over.
Conclusion
Siege Survival: Gloria Victis is an interesting and challenging game. The different gameplay elements during the day and the night are perfectly integrated into the setting. The added element of having to contribute to the war effort of the soldiers makes this game even more challenging. This game is a good survival game, with an interesting concept. While some rough edges are still visible, the developers did a good job at combining a lot of different aspects into one game. Even though the package may seem daunting at first, the game is still fairly accessible.
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