Goliath

Released as a PC game before, Goliath now hits Xbox One. The game sees you as a crashed pilot that quickly finds out he’s a long way from where I thought he was. He has to gather resources and build tools for survival. Goliaths, big hulking combat robots are the obvious tool for this. Does this game stand apart from the other survival games out there? Let’s set up camp and find out.

THE GOOD

• While graphic style is always highly personal, Goliath looks pleasing to me, and the graphics are simple but effective. I like how you see the details of upgraded Goliath parts.
• The safe area and teleport systems are nice to use and convenient when you need to go out and look for certain resources that you encountered before.

MIXED FEELINGS

• There are so many survival games, and while the Goliath mechanic is interesting and possibly worth checking this game out for, I’m not sure it adds enough to recommend this game over the many other options. Especially when you spend quite some time just running away in your huge combat robot.
• I like that there is a story line, many resource gathering and survival games lack a story line. However, I can’t say it’s well written. There are definitely some funny or mildly entertaining parts, but on the whole, the conversations come across as unnatural, even considering the setting of the game.
• It’s nice that you can switch between different Goliaths and the pilot, but I found myself only playing as a pilot if all my Goliaths were destroyed or I just couldn’t get through a doorway while in a Goliath.

THE BAD

• The combat is just bad at times. You can get stun-locked in certain situations where you can’t do anything but wait until defeated. Even worse are spiders that spit out explosive projectiles that kill you in mere seconds when they hit, quickly going through all three Goliaths and sending you to the grave. Don’t even get me started on the bulls that rush you like a heat seeking missile. Usually, you can dodge them, but sometimes the game won’t let you, forcing you to take massive damage.
• The User Interface is far from optimized, and it’s evident this is not designed as a console game. Some games have great ports when it comes to controls and the UI, this is not really one of them.
• Some quests can be a bit obscure. At one point I had to drink Whiskey that I just couldn’t find. After a while, I discovered it was sneakily put into my inventory somewhere, among the dozens of other items. No separate quest item tab.
• I’ve had a lock up where my screen would just go black, even after switching games. A complete shutdown of the console was the only thing that helped.

Goliath is one of many survival games but adds its own identity to it through the Goliath system and the way they handle travel between maps. The combat issues really hold this game back. Instead of just being challenging it broke the gameplay at more than one time. As much as I like the Goliaths and think the game has its charm, I am hesitant to blindly recommend this title to anyone. If you really love big robots and don’t mind grinding until you can progress past an enemy, this game might be of interest to you.