Gobs and Gods

Introduction

Gobs and Gods hires a band of almost-heroic goblins to fight and die on the player's behalf, mixing turn-based tactical battles with procedurally generated quests across a fantasy world played mostly for laughs. Alexandre and Thierry Gilotte, a father-son development team, made and self-published it, releasing on 19 July 2024. With only 4 negative English-language reviews out of 65 total, this review reads all of them in full alongside the top positives, out of a corpus sitting at Very Positive, an exceptional roughly 93.8% — and the depth of engagement behind that score is genuinely striking.

A Battle Brothers descendant with real identity of its own

Reviewers reach for specific, well-chosen comparisons when describing what makes Gobs and Gods work. One detailed review framed it as "King's Bounty but with an RPG party instead of an army, and procedurally generated encounters and quests instead of fixed encounters," while another credited it as building meaningfully on Battle Brothers rather than simply copying it: "it makes your life slightly easier by never losing equipment and not paying salaries, while still having deadly combat where you easily lose a few gobs." That's a precise, informed comparison from someone who clearly knows the genre's touchstones well, not a vague genre namedrop. Multiple reviewers independently call it an "underrated gem" or "hidden gem," and the comedic tone draws specific praise for how it reframes the genre's usual permadeath tension — losing goblins is expected, even funny, rather than purely punishing.

Extraordinary long-term devotion

What separates this review's sample from a typical Very Positive score is the sheer depth of engagement behind it. One reviewer's account shows 91,221 minutes logged — over 1,500 hours — and their review, updated from an original written at 140 hours, states plainly: "This was my favorite game of 2024 and after many months of play, I am still firing it up every day," specifically crediting a responsive developer who has "continually been expanding" the game since launch. Another reviewer logged over 23,000 minutes and described the experience as "almost completely bug free," noting a single crash across hundreds of hours, mitigated entirely by reliable autosaves. That combination — a small player base logging genuinely extraordinary playtime, and independently confirming both quality and stability — is a stronger signal than review percentage alone.

What the handful of critics say

The negative sample here is small enough to take each complaint on its own terms rather than looking for patterns. One reviewer found the pace of unit loss more frustrating than fun for their taste, feeling resources invested in units that "die really easily" undermined the tactical planning they wanted. Another found core mechanics under-explained early on, describing a stretch of "just clicking on enemies without knowing why" before things clicked — a fair critique of onboarding rather than the underlying systems. A third reported a specific, verifiable technical issue: the game's graphics failing to scale properly at 4K resolution, serious enough to make it unplayable on their setup. A fourth found the early loop of fighting, looting and recruiting familiar and slow to differentiate itself, despite loving the soundtrack enough to want it sold separately.

Final Verdict

Gobs and Gods earns its exceptional score honestly: a genre-savvy evolution of Battle Brothers and King's Bounty's systems, wrapped in a comedic tone that makes its permadeath-adjacent structure feel like part of the fun rather than a source of dread, backed by a small but remarkably devoted community whose playtime numbers speak for themselves. Its four available critics raise fair, specific, individually minor points — unit fragility, onboarding clarity, a 4K scaling bug, and early-game familiarity — none of which undermine what its most invested fans describe as a genuine standout in the tactical RPG space. For fans of the genre, this is close to an essential, still-underrated pickup.