Goblin Stone Review (Harry)
The best part of this game is the graphics, unfortunately. There are a lot of design decisions in this game that summarily make it not that fun... the most fun, I guess, is the suspense that something cool might unlock. For me, 13.7 hours later, it didn't happen. I doubt I'll keep going.
The story started off very interesting, but by the second map, I started to really hate it. Instead of being the underdog against the bad humans, it's all about orc supremacy and being their little errand runners non-stop, which actually started in the first map. It's not interesting enough to want to see what happens in the third map.
For the design decisions that I have an issue with:
The controls are annoying - finish a fight, try to loot, it talks at you like Darkest Dungeon (and repeats a lot) but removes your controls, wait, then you try to loot again and sometimes you have to do it twice to make it go. Also, clicking the mouse doesn't loot if you are too far away, it stops moving as soon as you let go of the key, but holding it down won't loot either you have to click it again. Once I found hitting the space key works, I just spam that until it does it.
When completing combat, the combat loot randomly gets dumped somewhere. I especially enjoy it when it puts it behind some of the fancy shrubberies that are in front of the goblins, then I have to fight my camera or hit space a whole lot everywhere. Oh, there is also sometimes random loot that you can't see (there might be a shiny treasure pixel or something) which reinforces my space spamming.
The stages have a ton of temporary buffs, most of which are weak, and the stages are short, which make most of the stage pointless.
The stages are also filled with an odd walking simulator mechanic, I guess in order to see the pretty graphics somebody did, but it's annoying after a while. Maybe I'm just impatient.
Ambushing (approaching an enemy from behind) is random AF. Half the time nothing happens, the other half only part of them are surprised.
Why does bleed to a crapton of damage, but poison takes a very large amount of stacks in order to do anything? If anything, I would think it the other way around (small amount of poison kills, but death by 1000 cuts)
The buildings are extremely uninteresting. You can dig out all this depth, but the only buildings that you can duplicate are the item holding ones and the retiree ones, which are barely helpful. Half my spaces are literally empty.
I keep hoping for a way to add permanent enchantments on my weapons but I have to pray to RNGESUS for the merchant to show up with decent ones - it is rare.
Soul currency is beyond weird. You do not get a soul per goblin death like you may expect, you get X amount of souls depending on if they've seem combat, how many adventures they been on, their age, and if they get to retire or not. That's right, you get more souls if they retire. No souls if they haven't seen combat. What the f...
The breeding doesn't make a lot of sense beyond a basic level. The max stats seem to be tied to the story, so there is no real point to the breeding system - you just do the story then rescue a goblin or hire a squatter then breed that one.