NOCLIP Pocket E85 - Playing Broomstickers - Chop Goblins

Oh no! They podcasted the building down! Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Chop Goblins, a surprising-in-many-ways FPS by David Szymanski. Chop Goblins is short, with only five levels and five weapons, and can be beaten for the first time in two hours or less, but because of this it never overstays its welcome and keeps introducing new things over the course of the game, including new enemy types. The titular Chop Goblins are not a design that is easy to take seriously, along with most of the rest of the game, but you can see in them that there actually was a lot of care put into making the game feel right. Different kinds of enemies require different strategies to effectively defeat without taking damage, and managing groups of them is core to playing the game well. The game is a “boomer shooter” by definition, but it has a strong core that comes from experience and the love of the genre. I’m not sure how else you’d want me to synopsize Chop Goblins, it’s just a simple, fun game with a better core than you might expect. We’re going to be talking about how the levels and music are used to emphasize the game’s innate silliness and comedy, the feel of all the weapons and what makes them each interesting choices, and we draw a a comparison to one of our favorite games of all time, Rascal. Thank you for joining us this week! We did this game partly to get through something short because we have a lot of more time-consuming games coming up this month, but also because I played it on release and it has really stuck with me for some reason. Seeing a game this competent with this ridiculous of a premise just really warms my heart. Did you play Chop Goblins? …why not? Let us know down in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re returning to the ole Epilogue well and doing an episode about Kingdom Hearts, sort of in preparation for our next big episode on Kingdom Hearts 2, so we hope you’ll keep an eye out for that!