Gold Rush: The Game released back in 2017 on PC. Fast forward to 2021 and Code Horizon decided to make it available on consoles. Playstation and Xbox owners (current and last-gen) can now try their hands on being a gold prospector.
Channel your inner Parker Schnabel
Gold Rush: The Game is based on the Discovery Channel show starring Parker Schnabel. A small Discovery Channel logo and the same promotional photo used for the first series can be seen in the menus. If you were hoping to see more actual tie-ins with the show… you’re out of luck. My guess is Code Horizon made a gold mining sandbox game and tried to beef up their sales by asking Discovery Channel if they could use their name. Surely a great attempt to legitimize this game and bring in some fans of the show. To be honest, the affiliation with Discovery Channel and the show was what caught my attention. Sadly, the game doesn’t feature anything in-game linked with the show. I have to say, I felt a bit cheated because of it.
Make dirt turn into gold
Gold Rush: The Game starts out with a lengthy tutorial. The tutorial takes you through every step needed to start mining gold. The meticulously laid out tutorial is in fact very necessary to get started. Gold mining is no easy task which is also made clear right from the start of this game. I’ve reviewed a few sandbox simulators from time to time to know this is what to expect. Every detail of the job is included in the game to make this the ultimate virtual gold mining experience. The tutorial introduces you to the vast amount of tools available before allowing you to claim your own land and start making a living. It’ll take some time to amass the setup introduced in the tutorial. Luckily every tool is explained in the help section of the game.
Rinse and repeat
After looking at the instructions and making use of Digitube – youtube tutorials for gold mining – I felt relatively ready. It didn’t take long for me to be bored because every task is so darn repetitive. For instance, rinsing the mosses for gold nuggets… These mosses need to be collected one by one. If you hold one, you can’t pick up another one. Using a bucket to collect them all is also out of the question. The machine for rinsing these mosses has slots for each one. You have to stand right in front of the slot in order to put them in otherwise the game thinks you want to put the moss on top of the machine. This simple task took me about 15 minutes and as a result, was less than fun.
Not the smoothest experience
Just walking around in Gold Rush: The Game was rage-inducing. The speed at which the character walks around is comically slow. Every small unevenness in the terrain slows you down making walking back and forth excruciatingly tedious. Luckily I figured out running ignored all these bumps before losing my mind. Walking was bad enough, the driving was even worse. The handling of the truck and other machines on wheels feels so awkward. The game offers different camera angles to make it easier but none of them seem to work. While driving, the camera isn’t fixed to the direction your driving resulting in me looking like a drunk driver. Luckily the world is completely empty from other life forms or I might have gone full Carmageddon by accident.
Driving around the open world wasn’t smooth either. I went from my site to town to get supplies and the game froze 2 times to load in the next area. While that happens you are stuck in limbo. Once the game loaded you are not warned at all resulting in driving straight ahead and bumping in everything. There were instances where I needed to reload a save game because I was genuinely stuck. To top things off, even looking around wasn’t the smoothest experience. The jitter occurring when you looked around made me question if I was drunk. For the record… I wasn’t.
Bad port
I haven’t played the PC version of this game. I’ve watched some footage of it in preparation for this review and saw people having a much better experience. I get that converting a game to consoles isn’t the easiest thing to do but I feel this one is done particularly badly. I think I would’ve at least been able to enjoy the experience if I was playing this game on PC but on console, it feels unfinished/unpolished.
Conclusion
Gold Rush: The Game does a great job of simulating almost every aspect of gold mining in great detail. The extensive library of handling instructions for each task shows the intention of this game. Sadly this wasn’t translated the way it should on consoles. Therefore I would heavily advise against getting this version. Instead, opt for the PC version if you want to try your hands at a gold mining simulator.
