In the world of strategy and management game Goblin Stone, goblins are nearly extinct. Being slaughtered in gigantic numbers by adventurers hungry for a quick experience point and a handful of coins will make that happen. I can’t tell you that will be they want to bestow protection and prosperity upon these nasty green nibblers. They exhibit a childishness that you either find charming or wickedly manipulative, even as they bathe in the blood of their enemies. However, if you wish, Goblin Stone offers you the chance to save these maligned outcasts from extinction by rebuilding their kingdom and leading them on expeditions to do battle with all the heroes who have been the focus of your attention on the left side of your screens for too long.
On these expeditions, your six-person goblin troop explores the land and fights turn-based battles, gathering resources to build your base and personal treasures. There are also more unique encounters, such as testing your team’s stats against a trio of rogue chefs wielding a mysterious ham. You have access to a (slightly Slayish, slightly Spirelike) full map from the get-go, so you can plan your routes based on what you hope to gain from your expedition. At first, these choices are fairly straightforward: do you choose a uncomplicated treasure fight? Or a more challenging more treasure? You’ll soon find yourself going on expeditions specifically to gather certain resources, like bones or wood, so you might want to prioritize gathering spots. Or you might run into a nasty boss, lose, and know to hit as many vendors, treasure chests, or blessing shrines as possible on your next expedition to prepare.
However, if all your gobs get killed by a bunch of nasty non-hobbits, you’ll still make progress. Not in terms of loot you’ll lose, but in souls. Along with resources, souls are the main currency you’ll need to upgrade your lair. Experienced gobs are worth more souls, and you can retire them in a special room. They’ll hang around like that, growing long beards and allowing you to continue breeding them. Breeding is… honestly, not that much fun. You pick two gobs with stats or traits you want to breed, usually to get the best candidate for your chosen class. Many of the traits are pretty learned, mostly related to stat modifiers. Most gobs look the same. No beards for your real-life battle goblins. Maybe a different smile if you’re lucky. Missed opportunity? I mean, “breeding goblins isn’t that fun” is a devastating sentence to have to write, right?
These classes are well thought out though, with a lot of variety and, most importantly, a wide selection of fancy hats (that’s me, that cutie). Your gobs are individually tender but deadly as a team, giving battles a suitably gobish “death by a thousand cuts” feel. Sometimes, quite literally. Your raider can deal two bleed stacks with an upgraded throwing dagger, while a second one picks up those wounds to add another, and then a third can unleash a devastating “blood awakening”, converting those stacks into massive instant damage. A sentinel wielding a stool shield can stun a zombie, putting the next raider in line to “awaken” – a two-hit combo that adds a third hit to stunned or slowed enemies. Shamans can heal, sentinels can buff tanks’ armor and hits, and other, secret classes can do other, secret things as well. Again, it’s all about teamwork.
The best idea Goblin Stone has nothing to do with goblins, but it’s also relatively unsexy, at least compared to those sexy, sexy goblins. I’ll call it the “time bar.” Both friend and foe move along the time bar, from the outside in toward the center, where they act. Along the bar are numbered pips. Each turn, you choose one of three abilities, randomly selected from four. Each ability costs a certain number of pips, sending your gob to the end of its turn and that number of pips back to the bar. You’ll get the hang of it in about fifteen seconds. After another fifteen, you’ll learn to appreciate abilities that manipulate the bar, pushing enemies back or stunning and slowing them. Bar manipulation is king here. Plan it well, and you can keep your enemies in their tracks, stealing turn after turn. It’s a spotless, uncluttered design element of the combat flow that works well with many abilities.
My problem with Goblin Stone is how monotonous everything is. You’ll need those lair upgrades to unlock advanced classes and other adventure perks, but lair upgrades mean grinding, and grinding means hours of tardy, repetitive combat. There are about eight skills total for each of the nine classes, four of which you can equip each round, so things get formulaic very quickly. You can’t shorten the combat animations. Gold, the most common reward, just isn’t that useful. The best trick in the genre is to make moment-to-moment progress feel as valuable as the bigger picture, but there’s no real deckbuilding or many constant upgrades, so the micro-rewards are limited, and even the macro-rewards aren’t all that stimulating, outside of up-to-date classes. It’s exhausting when you realize you’ll have to play about three rounds to reach the next progression milestone, and even more so when those rounds don’t offer much up-to-date.
I don’t need to tell you that Goblin Stone’s art direction is gorgeous, or that its user interface impresses me with its crisp purity. Less obvious are the winking Bakshi movements of human enemies or the parchment-sketched inserts of fairy tales. The music is also stunning, all cheery and pastoral, and the narrator speaks from the heart. But what you should ask yourself before you decide to play GobStone is what kind of space you want the game to occupy. If you’re looking for your next Spire- or Monster Train-shaped obsession, ripe for long, devoted evenings, I think you’ll hit a wall here a lot sooner than you’d like. But 20 minutes of relaxation a day with a coffee? These issues will persist for some time, allowing their charm to remain powerful for a much longer time. And of course, it all comes down to how well that charm resonates with you.
I have a list of other complaints rather than the effusive praise I wanted to give here. You fight a handful of heroes for a long time after the introduction. I signed up for killing heroes, but it’s all zombies, wolves, and spiders. I can kill those motherfuckers anywhere. The game threatens a good idea by letting you collect healing items during quests that you can sell if you don’t utilize them. A potentially nice risk/reward ratio that falls miniature of expectations because, like I said, gold just isn’t that useful compared to how common it is. The main problem, though, is the pacing. I’m left in a weird situation where it’s too tardy to really want to play anything more than a pick-up game here and there, but the single-player gameplay just isn’t very satisfying, tense, or tactically engaging. So if I don’t want to play for a while and don’t want to play for a long time, I assume I don’t really want to play at all? Shit. Sorry, gobs. I guess it’s about extinction.
This review was written based on a copy of the game provided by the developer.
