Goblin Stone is a beautifully crafted Roguelike with turn-based combat. At first glance, it beat my initial expectations. I’m not usually a fan of Goblins in games. Nothing personal; they just don’t stand out to me! However, this game had me loving the adorable little Goblins, and I was eager to strive forward with the game for a while.
Sadly, the more I played, the less I enjoyed my experience.
Confusing Beginnings
The prologue introduces you to a trio of adventurers who slay Goblins. Initially, it can be confusing, as the game advertises that you’ll be playing as Goblins. So, why are we playing as a trio of adventurers slaying the little guys? This beginning cutscene sets up the story of the Goblins you start with and also introduces you to the combat mechanics.
Compared to some roguelikes, the combat was surprisingly easy to get to grips with. It’s similar to that of Darkest Dungeon but watered down to make it easier to understand. As someone who struggled with the specificities of Darkest Dungeon, I found this combat easy to get on with and enjoyed the small bouts of combat immensely.
Slow Burn
The game takes a while to ramp up and introduce you to all the new mechanics, but it’s a lot of fun once it does. It can get quite chaotic; sometimes, the odds are not in your favor. Losing your strongest goblin before a boss fight can ruin your day, and I struggled to pick the game back up for a little while afterward. I felt defeated and unsure if I could complete the boss fight.
Goblin Stone is an excellent choice if you’re a resource management fan. After a while, you unlock the option to create Lairs, and from there, you can breed Goblins to try to make the perfect specimen to have the strongest Goblins on your team.
Although the combat is excellent, it can feel a little lackluster as you make your way through the game. There aren’t many options regarding weapons or different attacks, making combat feel lengthy and tedious, especially if you’re in a long fight against a difficult group of enemies or a boss fight.
Some of the traits are a lot of fun, but it feels that they aren’t well explained at times, and it’s hard to know which goblin you should put on the frontline as a result. Overall, the first couple of hours were great fun, and I really did enjoy the resource management at first. However, it doesn’t get any easier, even if you have strong goblins on your team. Then you have to make sure you’re keeping an eye on what Goblins are breeding, as you don’t want ones that don’t have ideal stats. It slowly devolves into an unfortunate mess.
Wrapping Up
While the game is very pretty, and the Goblins are super cute, nothing else grabbed me. I did enjoy some of the combat and resource management aspects, but eventually, I found that there wasn’t enough variety to keep me interested. Between losing some of the most vital assets to my team and not having much weapon and gear variety, there just wasn’t enough substance to keep me fully entertained. I enjoyed it for a couple of hours but slowly lost interest.
The first few hours were fun, but then it became more time-consuming and more of a slog with the gameplay not being fresh enough and overall just feeling recycled.
