Goblin Stone review

The world of gaming is full of terrifying enemies and badass bosses just waiting to ruin your day, but not enough time is spent thinking about those puny enemies that litter the start of a video game. Goombas and Slimes might not be particularly threatening, but throw enough of them at someone and eventually they’ll reign supreme. Goblin Stone tells the story of the least intimidating fantasy race, and tasks you with leading the little green dudes to a life of prosperity against all odds.

The game starts with you controlling a party of standard adventurers, wandering through a cave and looting all sorts of wonderful treasure. Before long they encounter a pathetic group of goblins, and beat them up without a care in the world. The goblins escape though, and find the Goblin Stone. This magical item leads them to their long lost city, and the goblins plan to live their best life and thrive as a race once more.

To do this the goblins will need all sorts of materials to upgrade their base, which they’ll only get by adventuring across the land. This means going through various dangerous environments and choosing paths to take to find various treasure, temporary upgrades and enemies on your trip out of the lair. You never know what you’ll find when you send your party of goblins out on a scouting mission, other than the potential for them to die forever at the hands of something nasty.

The combat in Goblin Stone is turn-based, with a focus on the positioning of goblins and enemies and slowing down your foes so they take longer to attack. Each time a goblin’s turn comes around you’ll have three attacks from their selection of moves to choose from, ranging from standard melee attacks to throwing a rock that stuns as well as damages or a vicious stabbing that causes an opponent to bleed. Each move takes a different amount of stamina, and once your active goblin uses an attack they’ll be pushed back along your line of attackers based on how tired it makes them.

Enemies have stamina too, so in tougher fights you’ll really have to put a lot of thought into who will be on the front lines when the next big enemy attack comes in. Moves that have a chance of knockback, stun or slow are essential to keeping your puny minions safe, or maybe you’ll use a guard class goblin to intercept the next incoming strike instead with its shield.

There are a variety of classes of goblin you’ll be able to recruit or breed (more on that later) each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Mages are great at damaging through armour and can heal your other goblins, but are pretty flimsy. Whereas guards have the potential to soak up damage and beef up their armour to almost impenetrable levels. At the start of the game though I focused on raiders, who have lots of bleed abilities and attacks that deal extra damage to anyone leaking red liquid.

Once you’ve safely got your goblins home, you’ll need to use the money and materials they looted to upgrade the base. You do this by attaching new rooms to the underground tunnels that make up your lair, and they all give you different buffs. Training rooms allow you to access extra abilities for each of the game’s classes, there’s a place for banged up goblins to retire and provide you with a powerful magical currency, and the crèche is there for all your goblin breeding needs. The variety of rooms is vast, and they can all be upgraded to make them more powerful and boost the strength of your goblins in various ways.

Breeding is one of the key parts of Goblin Stone that you’ll need to get stuck into, because with the right genetics you’ll gain access to much stronger minions. There’s the potential to pass genetic traits down the bloodlines you create, and base stats come from a mix of the parents too. With a bit of experimenting you’ll soon be creating an army of green beefcakes, who thankfully only take a day to grow to maturity and be battle ready.

There’s loads to keep you busy on your quest to make goblins great again, mainly in the form of quests that help direct you to the best thing to do next. Starting with fairly basic tutorials, you’re soon shown the best way to branch out and upgrade thanks to these objectives. Even with the assistance of these missions though (which come with cash rewards) you’ll still likely lose a few green friends along the way. Upon losing all HP once a goblin sustains a massive injury which causes them to lose half their health, but allow it to happen again and they’re gone forever. Bad plays will be punished in Goblin Stone, so look after the little fellas or you’ll find yourself struggling to progress.

I really enjoyed my time with Goblin Stone, but it does have a few issues. The biggest one I had personally was in how slowly it feels like your army powers up, with minor stat boosts from breeding and weapons requiring a lot of effort to obtain. It’s hard to get caught in the satisfying loop of upgrading and strengthening your goblin community when the strengthening is barely noticeable. There also isn’t quite enough enemy variety, and when you’re grinding early areas for resources fighting the same wolves and spiders over and over again it becomes a bit of a drag.

Goblin Stone is a charming RPG that shines the spotlight on the unloved fantasy character that deserves more attention, and is a hell of a good time. Combat requires some serious strategy to succeed in, and upgrading your base is a compelling task in itself. If you’re a fan of little green dudes and are looking for an RPG to keep you entertained, then look no further.