26-Feb-2004 you can't watch Return of the King and not want to command your own legion of slavering goblins, orcs and cave trolls. Which is exactly what Goblin Commander lets you do.
It's a real-time strategy game designed specifically with a joypad in mind. What this means is that rather than selecting individual units, your troops are automatically assigned to one of three tribes, each of which is assigned a button on the Dpad. Point at somewhere on the map and press the corresponding button, and the tribe marches to this point. Simple. Kind of like Pikmin, only set in Mordor.
Sounds cool then, but while the slick interface promises much, leading your little men to supremacy over the other rival Goblin factions is beset by problems, starting with the visuals.
Fug Ugly Goblin Commander's rough-hewn landscapes and angular figures are not a patch on the interstellar beauty of Nintendo's flower-power minor classic. And the lack of visual clarity hits gameplay hard, as you can't easily tell which terrain is breakable for resources, which terrain is passable to your troops, and what the hell is going on when the fighting starts.
But the main gaffe is spoiling the elegance of the interface with forcing you to attend to so much other fiddly stuff to keep your tribes up to strength. Because the goblins fall like flies when combat starts, you're permanently flicking back to base to build new replacements. So they've done away with loads of unit selection and organisation faff, only to replace it with loads of units building faff instead! What dill-wads!
You'd also have thought there'd be a fair share of humour in there, what with a Goblin's lack of social etiquette but it's a poker-faced affair, with your troops acting more like honourable Knights of the Round Table than dirty, thieving, man-flesh eating gits. Damn shame. We'll just have to watch Return of the King again instead.
Goblin Commander had us gnashing our pointy yellow teeth in excitement. But in creating a console-friendly RTS, it's only managed to replace one set of hassles with another.
So there are a maximum of ten Gobs in a tribe, and you can have a maximum of three tribes at once, yes? Each tribe has its own button on the D-Pad, and pressing that button means they all head to where your cursor is pointing at.
You can set a tribe to follow its Titan, which you control
You can set one tribe to follow another to keep everyone together
You can also go into third-person mode and control a tribe directly
// Build! Build!
There are two things to collect in GC - money and souls. Souls are used to build your goblins and trolls, whereas money is used to purchase upgrades and defence towers.
Money can be spent on upgrading your units’ weapons and armour
Souls are collected by killing enemies or controlling soul fountains
Money is collected by breaking up logs, houses and other scenery
Defensive towers are the only buildings you can construct
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