Goblin Buster: Incremental Tower Defense Review

Goblins, gems, and a promising idea

Goblin Buster: Incremental Tower Defense sets out to fuse two genres that share more DNA than it might first appear: tower defense's spatial puzzle-solving and the incremental genre's ever-expanding skill tree of upgrades. Developed and published solo by Natrix, it launched on Steam on 31 October 2025 (after two brief delays from an original late-October target, confirmed through the developer's own pre-launch news posts) at NZ$10.99. The pitch is simple and delivered honestly on the store page: obliterate goblin hordes, collect materials, discover relics, and pour resources into a "massive skill tree" of tower and spell upgrades.

For a good portion of its runtime, that pitch pays off. Starting with basic archer towers, you gradually unlock fire, shadow, and other elemental towers, each with its own upgrade branch, while a small town-building layer generates passive resources alongside whatever you earn in combat. Reviewers consistently praised the art direction -- cute, clean pixel work with varied biomes across its three zones -- and the soundtrack, which several specifically called out as appropriate and non-repetitive even after hours of play. The most common single word used across dozens of positive reviews is "charm," and it's earned: this looks and sounds like a much more expensive game than its budget price suggests.

The incremental half of the design is where opinions genuinely split, and the split tracks a real, identifiable design tension rather than simple taste. Several reviewers loved discovering a specific relic-and-tower combination that let them "sail through" or "juice" their way past the late game, treating the search for a broken build as its own kind of fun -- a legitimate incremental-genre pleasure. Just as many reviewers ran into the exact same problem from the other side: once the strongest combos are found, remaining towers and upgrade paths become obsolete, and the challenge collapses into repetition. One reviewer summarised it bluntly as being "not a true idler" -- because progress is hard-capped and still requires active, repeated play -- while also finding the active tower-defense layer "dated and barebone," concluding that "both idler and active play are half-baked." That's a harsher read than the average review, but it identifies the same structural issue that more forgiving players describe more gently: the two halves of the hybrid don't always reinforce each other as cleanly as the pitch promises.

Length is the second major sticking point, and it's remarkably consistent across the review sample: figures of two to eight hours to fully complete the game, including 100% achievements, come up again and again, with a meaningful number of reviewers explicitly saying the NZ$10.99 asking price feels steep for that amount of content, even as most still recommend it at a discount. To Natrix's credit, the response wasn't silence -- Steam's news feed shows three patches in the two weeks after launch, including a rebalancing pass, bug fixes, a new resolution option, and a free endless mode aimed directly at the length complaints. That's a genuinely responsive launch window. The trouble is what several reviewers report happening after that window closed: by early-to-mid 2026, multiple reviews describe the game as functionally stalled, with harder late-game maps still effectively uncompletable for some builds, at least one reviewer calling the last achievement "not realistically obtainable," and no further content updates despite the developer's own launch-era promise of free post-release additions.

Launch week also brought a cluster of rougher technical complaints worth weighing honestly: reports of UI buttons that played a sound but didn't respond, missing bestiary unlocks, cannon towers that stopped targeting enemies entirely, and no widescreen support for the actual tower-defense map even though UI elements stretched into the black bars. None of these were universal -- most reviewers who mentioned bugs still recommended the game overall -- but they cluster tightly enough in the first few weeks of reviews to suggest a rushed launch rather than isolated bad luck. Quality-of-life gaps compound the impression: no hotkeys, no scroll-wheel zoom on either the map or the upgrade tree, and tooltip-free buttons that leave new players guessing what a targeting-priority toggle actually does.

Where the value proposition lands

Pricing complaints in the review sample are worth taking at face value rather than dismissing as the usual internet griping about cost. When a meaningful share of a 156-review sample independently converges on the same math -- roughly NZ$1-2 per hour of content at full price versus a genuinely reasonable deal once discounted -- that's a signal about the game's actual shape, not noise. Several reviewers explicitly ran the numbers themselves, comparing the price to a meal out or a tank of petrol and concluding it was worth it regardless of length, while others did the same math and landed on "overpriced." Both conclusions are reasonable reactions to the same underlying fact: this is a snack-sized game wearing a mid-tier indie price tag, and how you feel about that trade-off will likely determine how you feel about the whole experience more than anything else covered above.

It's also worth separating the game's two audiences, because they seem to be having noticeably different experiences with the same content. Players who found and leaned into one of the game's few dominant tower-relic combinations describe a relaxing, almost meditative late game where numbers climb and difficulty evaporates -- exactly what incremental fans show up for. Players who didn't stumble onto those combinations, or who deliberately avoided them to preserve some challenge, describe exactly the opposite: a wall of scaling enemy health with no clear tools left to answer it. That's not necessarily a contradiction so much as a sign the skill tree's power curve is steeper and narrower than it should be -- a handful of "correct" answers surrounded by a lot of upgrade paths that quietly stop mattering once you find them. A wider spread of genuinely competitive strategies, rather than a few standout combos surrounded by filler, would go a long way toward satisfying both camps at once.

Verdict

Goblin Buster: Incremental Tower Defense is a likeable, good-looking small game with a real spark of a good idea in its tower-and-relic incremental mashup, and Natrix's quick post-launch patching shows real care for the project in its first weeks. But a short, easily-exhausted campaign, balance that swings between trivial and brick-wall depending on which combo you find, and signs that development slowed to a crawl well before the promised content ever arrived make this a game best bought on sale, with modest expectations about how much game is actually here.