There are games that have questionable play mechanics, overly linear plots, and call themselves RPG's in spite of having little to no role-playing, handing you only pre-made characters with rigid stat progressions, and offering little to no sense of the customization that is the hallmark of an RPG. Quite a few of them survive anyway and ride it out on the strength of their plots and characterization. Gorky17 isn't one of them. I suppose it's possible there is an engaging story in there somewhere, but I never found it. If a game doesn't hook me within an hour or so, I've generally got better games to play. Gorky is one of the handful of games that not only didn't hook me, it repelled me. I love turn based strategy games, and will put up with some real dogs of featuresets and stories to play mediocre turn based strategy games. I love chess too, so you would think Gorky17's infamous chess based ruleset to its turn based battles would be at least decent. Instead I found myself baffled as to why anyone would do this. It makes no sense to combine gunplay and chess movesets, and never gelled as a concept. It's too bad because there were some options that could have made some sense--like all small-arms are queens, grenades are knights, Rockets are Rooks, and knives working as pawns almost works--but that isn't what they came up with. The result feels like a forced metaphor--and it is.
