Gooblins

I'll be straight with you: Gooblins is the kind of tiny VR release that dropped in late 2016, got almost no coverage, and quietly waited for someone to actually give it a fair shot. It's a wave-based first-person shooter built specifically for the HTC Vive, and the pitch is simpler than it sounds on paper. Adorable creatures flood the space around you with plasma blasts, fireballs, and kamikaze charges. You shoot them. You survive. Except there's a wrinkle that elevates it past pure arcade reflex-work: the only way to climb the leaderboard is to kill Gooblins in the specific color order shown on your weapon display. That one constraint turns a casual wave-shooter into something closer to a rhythm-puzzle game wearing a shooter's coat. The physical setup leans hard into what made early Vive titles exciting. Your gun hand fires, your off-hand carries an energy shield that blocks plasma and fireballs cold, though any Gooblin willing to body-slam the shield still chips your health. The shield overheats and needs a brief cooldown, so you're constantly juggling offense, defense, and that color sequence in your peripheral vision. Grenades add another timing layer: launch with the gun grip, detonate with the shield grip. Get the detonation wrong and you waste the cluster kill, which usually means blowing a combo chain you'd been carefully building. It's fiddly in a way that feels intentional rather than clumsy. You can also toggle between 360-degree and 180-degree play modes, which is a small but genuinely considerate touch for anyone whose cable management is already in crisis. As waves progress, the Gooblins gain more firepower and defensive capability, and distinct enemy types show up with their own behaviors. Yellow Gooblins, for instance, will slowly drift toward you if you leave them unattended, so you can't simply cherry-pick combos without spatial awareness. Survive long enough and you unlock a machine gun, which is satisfying for clearing unshielded clusters quickly but does nothing for your score unless you're still threading the color sequence correctly. That tension between raw survival and scorecard optimization is where the game lives or dies for any given player. The honest caveat here is significant. Gooblins has almost no public review footprint. There's a reported broken achievement (the "Fire Extinguisher" unlock for kamikaze kills) that appears to have never been patched, which will bother completionists. The game has no campaign structure, no progression outside the leaderboard, and no multiplayer. If you want a VR experience with narrative weight or long-term build variety, this isn't it. What it is, is a score-attack toy with a cleverly added cognitive layer, the kind of thing that makes a good fifteen-minute session but doesn't pretend to be more than that. For a certain type of player, that honesty is its own virtue.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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