Goliath, a fun little RPG/Mech/Action game developed by Whalebox Studio who also worked on Viking Brothers. In a style similar to games like Torchlight or Diablo you will control an Engineer/Pilot of a ship that has crash landed on a foreign world, infested with beasts just itching to tear you limb from limb. Gathering up resources you will establish a small base and create your own beasts of war, the Goliaths.
Story
You awaken in the debris of a crashed plane, a static filled radio leads you to the cockpit where you find out one other person survived, your co-pilot. Piecing together some information you find that you have been separated from your friend and only link to your old world, oh yeah you’ve been transported to another dimension? You are quick to find that you have suffered some slight amnesia and your buddy isn’t too fond of repeating the past, telling you that the only thing you should worry about is the monsters in your way to him.
As you travel this new world you will find it is separated into “shards” and “islands”, your friend being about 4 islands away from some deducing. You will soon come into contact with the natives, 3 groups of highly differently species all vying for power, asking you to pick sides here and there. On top of learning new languages you will come into trade agreements with the 3 factions, gaining trust through missions and resource quests.
The main story will last just over 6 hours, but every shard on the map contains at least 1 mission to complete or a mini-boss to fight, with some side shards to explore for harder enemies and better loot. With plenty of side-objectives, unlockable golem types, arena fights, reputation to max out, levels to gain and more you can increase your playtime immensely. With “several endings” you might want to replay the game to see the differing outcomes, with 3 choices to make from the factions and what you do in the final conflict.
Gameplay
You take on a slight isometric view of the world as you control your character, with a handgun, invisibility field and camp all access through Left Trigger and A, X and Y respectively. You can chop down trees or crush bushes for logs and branches to help create your camps as well as your goliaths. To create a goliath you need the blueprint for them on top of the resources needed to make them, wood and branches for the Wooden Goliath, Stone and Silicon for Stone Goliath and so forth for Metal and Crystal.
As you kill enemies and complete quests you will gain both EXP and Gold, exp will eventually give you levels that increase your max health, unlock new upgrades for your camp, new blueprints for goliaths as well as new abilities for all your goliaths. The gold can be traded for a whole variety of resources, weapons, consumables etc from merchants scattered around the maps and within the faction’s basses. You can also save characters out in the wilds who will join you at your camp, gaining merchants or people who can upgrade you existing weapons for Gold.
Resources gathering and survival will become a background thought once you’ve started down the goliath road. Chitin or webbing from spiders will come in truck loads as you go through the story, with trees becoming casualties of war, all of what you will need will come to you without much effort. There are potions, oils, mines on top of better weapons for your arsenal which you will be spending most of your gains on, however for a lot of the game you won’t need to use these tools.
There are dungeons in some of the bigger areas of the map, around3 of them are story central in which you are forced to traverses with a few more optional ones. These are a nice change in pace for the game, fighting onslaughts of enemies to reach the end which is either full of loot or harder enemies to test your goliaths. Dungeons can become quite tiresome at time though, with plenty of them being full of spider enemies that will eventually seem redundant when you can kill 6 of them in one attack.
Overall Thoughts and Feelings
The music in Goliath fits the style of the game as well as the settings they are played within, however they don’t fit the events for most of its playtime. They become rather played out, each track being either repeated too often or with too much of a delay between each song, which was fixed a bit in a recent patch but still can sometimes leave you in silence. There is not enough energy within battle tracks, with the volume not reaching the correct heights for the situations they are played within. The boss battles are brought down by their lacklustre tracks, having little to no variance in sounds or instruments. The final boss music in particular has about 3 different instruments or strums of them within the loop that is played, sound effects overpowering whatever that try to convey.
The quest structure and story of the game are saddening to say the least, with the story taking too long to pick up with no real pull on the player. You don’t spend enough time with the individual characters to become attached or even side with, the final choice between the 3 factions is just a choice with no feeling besides “what would happen”. There are too many “kill this” or “deliver this” quests in the game, making it feel like a rehash wherever you travel. There are plenty of ruins relating to the 1930s the game is meant to be set within, ruins and crashed ships that are never touched on or delved into, a sorely missed opportunity.
Goliath is a good game for the first few minutes, but after that it seems to forget what it started as. You will only really need the Wooden Goliath for the majority of the game due to its DPS and quick speeds, the Metal and Crystal only being useful for their special abilities. As you progress the gain in power is underwhelming, seeing a huge boss with an even bigger health bar, and killing it within 1 minute with the starter golem.
Overall Goliath gets a 6/10, it has a lot of potential, the Goliath customising is rather interesting but implemented poorly, forcing you to “grind” out objectives to unlock better parts for them. Reputation gains are too easy and fast to get, just spamming the resource hand-ins will get you max in no time at all. The levels are designed uniquely but after 30 shards you will see a pattern develop. The music needs more work with dull sounds following you on your path of destruction. Fans of Torchlight might enjoy this game, but if you want a survival, build a base game this is not for you as the resources gathering becomes a background matter after 20 or so minutes.
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