LifeisXbox’s Gold Rush: The game review | Outside, a rooster is doing its thing. I refuse to open my eyes because last night was another late shift. I toss and turn, up until the point of nearly getting my much-deserved sleep. But then… DRRRRR… I get forcefully awoken by a sound that can only be described as a thousand horses droning past my window, followed by swearing that would even make a pirate blush. I squeeze my eyes shut, refusing to acknowledge what is about to happen. Finding that sweet spot on my pillow, I can feel my tiredness set in. And as I am about to slip into a nice deep sleep? BANG BANG BANG, within its wake “The digger ‘s broken again.” Ugh… I hate gold miners. – Welcome to Gold Rush: The Game. Based on Discovery Channel‘s hit series and brought to us by Code Horizon. If you already heard about this game then you aren’t mistaken either. Because Gold Rush: The Game originally came out on PC way back in 2017! Your mission? Build and manage a successful gold mining company from the … ground … up! Get it? Héh héh, I crack myself up sometimes! And yes, I can hear you think. But this is a game based on a TV series. Is it good then? As we all know, they are either hit or miss. But if you’re really eager to find out? And really want to know? Then prepare yourself, because we’re going deep in our review of… Gold Rush: The Game.
We played Gold Rush: The Game for 4 hours on the Xbox Series X. This game is also available on Playstation and PC
What we liked!
- Nothing | In all honesty? I tried. I really tried. But I really couldn’t find anything worthwhile to write about in this section.
Somewhere between
- A lot of depth | When talking about how much Gold Rush has to offer? I really got to say. They really knocked this one out of the park! I would have put this in the What we liked section, but the problem is that this game is in such a broken state at this moment, that it is ridiculous to give it any good or decent points. You’ll read more on this in the what we disliked part. So what do I mean with “A lot of depth”. Your goal is to push an entire gold mining operation out of the ground and be successful. This literally means from your starting “gold panning”, where you dig up dirt with a shovel rinse gold flecks and particles in a giant pan, selling whatever you get? And doing it all over again, up until you make enough money for you to start buying machinery to simplify your job. Eventually, you’ll take in employees to automate certain parts and buy new plots that are just laden with gold. And it will be up to you to determine which machinery is best suited for which plot. There is a LOT of information in your in-game wiki, together with a Youtube-Esque video player, which gives you visual information on how to do certain tasks.
What we disliked
- Bugs | Well lads, we struck gold! … But not in the way that Gold Rush: The Game intended for it to happen (or at least, I hope that they didn’t mean for this travesty to happen!). It’s laden with issues that just, in all honesty, shouldn’t be allowed in this day and age (for ports). Where to start? Well, maybe. That’s where I should start! The start! And with that I mean the tutorial. I tried guys, I really did. I tried to finish the tutorial three times, but every time it just glitched out. What happened? The first attempt didn’t allow me to do one of the first tasks. Which was to restore my car to respawn location. Why? The point where I had to click to do the restore? Was locked onto my damn car, not allowing me to do the restore because I couldn’t click the right spot! Okay… No problem. So let us try again. Success! I got progression! Slogging through the starting tutorial mission which is in an already extremely advanced mining operation set up, one of the final objects that I had to put into the cleaning machine, my mats? Dropped through the ground! What! And I couldn’t get to it anymore, so… Tutorial failed, yet again. That was 40 minutes down the drain. Restart… Again..! Success! I completed the tutorial! … Next tutorial mission, go! I did what was asked of me, bought the necessary gear, and went to the designated area. I stepped out of my pick-up truck, went to the back to take out my gear, and… Noticed that what I put into the back? Had become unclickable! I tried flipping the back, crashing my car into stuff to dislodge whatever was in it. Did a restore of my car… But nope… And it was then that I realized how fundamentally broken this game was! That was again 1h20 down the drain because of lazy design and porting! Talk about wasting my precious time! So I gave up on my tutorial binge and went into it, blindly. Only to come to the next horrifying conclusion. The game doesn’t tell you how to place your big machinery, and that is most likely locked somewhere in the tutorial section! Not even the ingame wiki or digtube tells you how to do it!
And let’s not forget, the much-beloved stuttering when looking around. It felt as if I was shivering the entire playthrough, with each move I made, shiver shiver shiver. UGH! - Loading… Loading… LOADING! | I’m not kidding when I’m going to *loading* talk about this next s*loading*ection! This game has non-sto*loading*p messages! And mind you, I am playing this on a Series X! I don’t even know how this is going to play on the regular One or One X. I created a few clips and shared this on my Twitter, so you can see how horribly coded this game actually is. Pathetic! I’ve had long stretches of road where I got 3 loading screens, only a few meters apart from each other! I mean come on. This is just bad design and bad sportsmanship from the developer! Release the game when it’s in a workable state, instead of this!
- It came from outer… 2001 |*blinks* Excuse me? Is this truly what a game in 2021 should be looking like? If this was 2001, sure, then the blurry and smudgy details on close-ups of your machinery would be looked through the fingers. But this is 2021, and we do tend to have a high tendency to want a game to look fairly decent when we buy something at the price-point of 25 euro. I looked up some screenshots of the PC edition, and even that, which released in 2017, looked better. What the frig happened? How does a port warrant a downgrade? There’s only one good answer here, Code Horizon. It doesn’t.
- Becomes boring, really fast | I knew this was going to happen, but come on! Let this be a huge warning for everyone out there. If you are not interested in management games or simulators? Steer clear from this one! It’s as interesting as licking dry-wall. The music isn’t engaging whatsoever, there is no interaction with anything. You’ll just be sitting there, panning and panning… Hours on end. Yay… So if you’ve got a short attention span? Might I suggest taking your money outside, make a paper airplane out of it and just throw it? Then at least, you’ll be having more fun than playing Gold Rush: The Game.
How long to beat the story | There is no end time.
How long to achieve 1000G | 10+ hours.
Similar with | Any other managment/simulation game.
CONCLUSION
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