Goblin Squad – Total Division Review: The Doctor’s Assessment

Subjective:

Event Horizon Studios presents Goblin Squad – Total Division, which is now available on the Steam store. The game is a fantasy adventure where the player is responsible for organizing and executing a goblin uprising to usurp a superior human enemy.

Objective:

Goblin Squad – Total Division is a one player, turn-based game with resource management and decision making being key themes outside of combat. Strategy-heavy combat phases are a key emphasis since your units are inferior to your enemies in almost every way.

Assessment:

This game has a great deal of potential. Upon initial examination there were elements of Settlers of Catan present that made me feel nostalgic. It was extremely satisfying to also find a simple, yet strategic combat system present to add another layer to the game. It’s always fun to play as the villains and this game does well to make it clear that your enemy is vastly superior to you when it comes to combat, making the focus strategic thinking above all else. The impending doom of a timer looming over your efforts reminded me of Majora’s Mask. It keeps games quick and facilitates immediate learning from your mistakes without investing too much time into any given round. Nothing is worse than making tons of progress after a ton of time only to be shut down by an insurmountable enemy and have that time wasted (looking at you Skyrim).

The artwork looks incredible and is meticulously well done, however there are still some interface issues with buttons not appearing when they should, etc. This was apparent as early as the tutorial when there were arrows on the screen attempting to teach me how to play but they were pointing at what appeared to be empty space. This was truthfully a bit frustrating because I thought that there would be things I wouldn’t understand in my first playthrough of the game itself. However, the reality was even worse than that as the buttons were still missing in the actual gameplay, making an entire layer of the game completely hidden from me. I checked that my game was running the most up to date version and was truthfully a bit disappointed to see that it was.

I would be likely to play this game again, but I would want the critiques above to be addressed first. Unless it’s a stylistic choice by the developer to leave the player in the dark, which is a valid element of some games, it’s frustrating to be missing pieces. In this game in particular, it feels like the pieces are supposed to be there but are having some issue with rendering or something along those lines. There’s certainly an intellectual challenge to be had here, which is something that I like in a game, so I hope that these hiccups can be addressed and that I can have the opportunity to try it again at its full potential.