Gold Gold Adventure Gold Review

The world revolves around the power of gold, which is why you are not the adventurer going out on daring and dangerous dives into a dungeon. You are the quest giver, and you have all the gold in the world to convince any daring adventurer to do what you want.

Gold Gold Adventure Gold (which I will call GAG from here on out) wants to let you experience the joy and struggle of being essentially the lord of a thriving adventurer town. However, you are not alone in your endeavor; you have a trusty God Beast alongside you, which, if you nurture it correctly, will become your greatest ally.

GAG has had a lot of sudden ups and downs from its early access through to its launch. To be perfectly honest, dear reader, the reason I waited a good amount of time before writing this review is that the game had a rocky launch, to the point where numerous bugs hindered the experience.

If I had reviewed it at launch, as originally intended, it would have been a "maybe" at best due to its issues. However, after speaking with the development team, I decided to hold off. At the time, major content updates were planned, and many of my complaints were said to be addressed. So I waited a bit longer just to give them a proper chance to cook before I fully dove in. Needless to say, my experience has been quite the roller coaster, but recently things changed as the developers finally fixed the core issues.

That being said, this is a project I have been following since its announcement, and I do want to believe in it. The question is, did the developers add enough in 1.0 and now with the 1.3 fixes to make the game worthy of all that wait?

Let's dive right in to find out.

Gameplay:

You are probably wondering where the story section is. Well, as of the time of writing this review, the game does not have a dedicated story mode, only promises of it being added down the line, so I will focus mainly on the gameplay and what we do have.

GAG is a city-management strategy game where you are the quest giver and the lord of the town. Your job is to build a thriving city for adventurers alongside your personal God Beast, and to protect it from the dangers of various kinds of dungeon monsters.

You have the option of playing two modes, either Conquest which is more level based and makes you take over territories throughout a continent which gives you permanent upgrades such as heroes you spawn with or just buildings/buffs. The main goal of this mode is to conquer the tile where the Dragon resides to fully take over the continent from monsters. 

The other mode is Colony, and you have only one objective: survive. This mode can be a challenging or a very chill experience, which allows you to build more freely with less strategy involved (unless you increase the difficulty). 

There are Minor differences between the two modes gameplay wise, but primarily is how you hire heroes and if there is a blood tax or not (gold you have to pay daily for amount of heroes you own). For this review I primarily focused on Conquest because it's the mode I enjoyed the most.

After selecting your mode, you get the choice between three small God Beasts, which have minor differences between each other. You don't have much control over what the God Beast does during gameplay, but you can train it by petting it and disciplining it, this way you can affect what tasks it can prioritize to help your village to thrive. As the God Beast fights and levels up, it will eventually evolve into a much bigger form. It's important to make sure you train it properly because it will follow you everywhere in both modes and in Conquest it keeps its levels, making it a invaluable ally to have.

The main loop of the game is that you start with a castle and a good chunk of gold. First you select three perks where two of them are guaranteed to be different adventurer buildings, which allows you to recruit heroes, and the last one being a random buff/spell/building you can use. With the starting gold you want to focus on getting your economy going with buildings like the forge (which powers up your adventures), and the market. To be honest, if you don't start with the market and forge, generating gold is going to slow down quite a bit until you have built them. Buildings can have "combos" where if they are placed next to each other, they gain a buff, market and forge increases revenue as an example, adventurer buildings alongside inn's increases how many you can recruit from the same building etc. 

Once you build an Adventurer house and recruit them, you'll want to incentivize them to go on quests or kill missions, most typically in a dungeon. Adventurers start out fairly weak with little to no equipment, for them to succeed you'll need to give them quests appropriate to their levels, for example farming at farm houses to start with. As they level up, they gain confidence to do harder quests, but if the gold reward is too low on a quest, they wont do it.

Lastly, at some point farmhouses will spawn, and these are your most important resource to defend, they will give you a good amount of gold. The issue is that it's random where they spawn on the map, so if you're unlucky, they can spawn next to a monster and get destroyed. They go into a cooldown before a new one appears. 

Every night or when a timer goes down, a monster hoard will spawn from a nearby dungeon to attack your village. The wave can be weakened by sending your adventurers into dungeons for different quests. It's honestly incentivized that you continuously send your adventurers in not only for gold and resources, but just to make each wave much more manageable.

And that is basically the main loop: get gold revenue, recruit and send adventurers on quests, train God Beast, endure the monster wave from dungeons, lastly build more and upgrade everything for stronger adventurers and more gold. To make your life easier, you can spend gold to terraform the environment to either control where the monster hoard goes, or to allow buildings to be built in those spots, more often than not, you want to do a bit of it for proper building combos.

This is pretty much what every stage or run becomes at the end. You do have some variety by getting different sub goals that can pop up randomly on the map, completing these gives you new perks, which can change your current playthrough. However, they don't change it significantly enough to change the core loop. Right now the game lacks variety when it comes to how you play it, the current loop isn't bad by any means (in fact I quite enjoy it myself), however, it's just lacking that bit of extra decision making at the moment.

Pros and Cons:

Let's start with the pros: The game is straight up gorgeous to look at, I love the art style, I love the music, I love the atmosphere and witty dialogue (honestly, there should be more of it).

The core base of the game is fairly strong and straightforward once you have learnt its tricks, and it's genuinely a fun time to teach your God Beast what it should prioritize and do in any playthrough. The adventurers are memorable and give you enough different strategy options to consider most of them. It's the kind of game you can chill with while watching a video etc.

I need to reiterate, the main selling point of this game is honestly how gorgeous it looks.

There exists in both modes proper customization when it comes to the difficulty of the game, you can keep the settings hard on other parts while getting rid of that annoying blood tax that hampers the gameplay. 

Conquest is genuinely a fun mode, getting powered up and getting a random set of stages to do with different objectives, becomes a fairly healthy gameplay loop, just needs more stages and rebalancing others.

The lovely adventure class Mooladins, yes they are a pro.

As for the cons: The biggest issue that you will encounter as a new player, is how little the game tells you about itself, and what all the different icons mean. There is a handy dandy tutorial that gives you the basics, but it's really the bare minimum to start with. The tutorial fails to tell you important details like: You can reposition any farm house that spawns to put them away from danger, you can increase taxes and how much your tax collector collects, you can make quest repeatable so that you don't have to redo them every time. When you level up permanently, you unlock perks and can choose starting perks, I didn't know that until much later! The only way I learnt this was to look at the community hub on steam where a very kind player explained it all nicely while also giving general tips.

For this type of game, there really should be a better encyclopedia for information and tips that a new player can dive into. Without these tips, the starting experience becomes rather frustrating and feels unfair.

Speaking of unfair, bugs in GAG have consistently been a back-and-forth affair, with fixed issues giving way to new ones popping out of the woodwork to mess with players. By the time of writing this review, I lost a conquest map at the very end because the game decided that I had somehow failed the main quest, which I thought wasn't even possible, costing me several hours of progress. Though, it is not as bad as it sounds, as there is not really a reward for clearing it other than an achievement currently.

It does hurt the game that there is no story mode as of writing this review. You are not given much context on why you are conquering a new continent or how you ended up with a God Beast at your side.

I am very thankful that you can turn off the blood tax. It is honestly just too punishing of a mechanic that hinders the fun, and it needs a complete rework if it is going to serve as a difficulty modifier.

Yandere girls: I have never before had such a love-hate relationship with a unit that was designed to make me feel exactly that.

I do believe the game came out of early access just a tad too early. Patch 1.3 feels much more complete than 1.0 did, and even then, there are still things missing as stated above.

Closing Thoughts:

At the end of it all, despite my issues with the game, I ended up playing GAG for over 70 hours. There is a lot of replay value in its design, and it has consistently been improving its core experience even after its original launch. There is still work to be done for this game to truly shine, but I have faith in the developers because they have kept at it, and it is the kind of game I want to see more of.

Gold Gold Adventure Gold is an ambitious project with a lot of charm, a beautiful art style, delightful music, and an addictive gameplay loop. It is not perfect and still needs work to reach its full potential, but even so, the game provides a relaxing atmosphere that you can easily lose hours to. 

VERDICT: Recommended
Reviewed on PC 
Review Copy was Provided