Goliath

Editor's Notes

Steam PC version reviewed.

Introduction

'Goliath' is the first game from Russian devs Whalebox Studio. The game has players building their giant robot in order to battle monsters in a savage land. Its first DLC, 'Summertime Gnarkness', features content meant for level 30 and above players and is available as a free update to the game.

The Game Itself: Our Reviewer's Take

Indie survival games are all the rage now, especially on Steam where they breed like rabbits. 'Goliath' starts off like most of them do, with the player character being dropped into the wilderness (literally this time, as they are involved in a plane crash) and then running around collecting trees, twigs, rocks, and so forth. After a few missions and tangles with deadly spiders and chickens, I was taught how to craft huge wooden automatons from the stuff lying around. These goliaths can follow me around like a bodyguard or be hopped into for direct control. They have special abilities like boulder throwing and spin attacks. They can be upgraded, repaired, and equipped with giant weapons.

With my newfound goliaths in tow I once again set out into the wilderness, looking for my copilot who has landed god knows where and is communicating with me via an unreliable radio. He’s on a different world, but there are teleporters on each world that I can hop to if I collect enough gems. On the different worlds I mostly find more of the same...trees, rocks, spiders. The monsters level up on each world, but they are often a mismatch for my level and I either stomp them handily or get stomped in seconds. There are dungeons, but they’re small, full of the same monsters and items, and generally not worth it.

To go along with the generic survival system is the same RPG and questing arrangement we’ve seen countless times. NPCs ask me to go find so many twigs, or find this lost person, or basically just fetch something, ad nauseum. I did a few just to test it out but quickly became bored. Actually, even with the somewhat novel survival/mech thing going for it, 'Goliath' is just a boring game. It doesn’t have the survival chops of something like 'The Flame in the Flood' or the crafting of a 'Subnautica', despite taking cues from many similar games that have come before it. I couldn’t get into the rote tree chopping, endless goliath repair, or dry exploration.

It’s not that the systems of 'Goliath' don’t work well, because they do. It’s not the kind of game that is broken or unplayable by any means. It’s all just so bland and tasteless. Once I had fully upgraded my base, which didn’t take very long, all that was left was shuttling from one biome to the next, looking for more parts and making more mechs that have a tough time with the local wildlife. Making any repairs away from base is expensive, so I wasn’t able to go rampaging into the woods willy nilly or risk my human guy dying too. The goliaths get bonuses based on their materials and the biome they’re in, like extra speed for stone goliaths in the rocky world and so on. Sadly, unlocking each new goliath is a tedious chore filled with those fetch quests and arbitrary world hopping. Enemy AI and pathfinding is simultaneously odd and predictable, and they are usually content to rush me while I pile boulders on top of them. Leveling, required for better abilities, is a rather slow grindfest.

The writers tried their hand at irreverent wit instead of a serious storyline, but most of the jokes aren’t very successful. The main character Gromov occasionally has some wry lines. He alternates between super cheerful and kind of strangely cheerful, and pokes at the fourth wall sometimes but doesn’t go far enough.