Alaska Gold Fever Review (PC)

Alaska Gold Fever touches on a repository that others have often failed to crack. Unlike Deep Rock Galactic—a game in which your sole purpose is to dig, collect, and repeat the same cycle hundreds of times over—AGF forces you to juggle a dozen balls at once. From the bitter temperatures to a ravenous stomach, a mine that is forever on the brink of collapse to a skill tree that illuminates countless extraction techniques and creative possibilities for shifting your gold dust. Oh, there’s a lot more to Alaska Gold Fever than what initially meets the eye. It isn’t just about prospecting and earning a few gold nuggets along the way; it’s about taking the Alaskan wilderness by the horns and learning to survive in a world where every step counts as a counterweight for another obstacle.

While the point of Alaska Gold Fever is to establish a functioning mining facility during the Gold Rush era, the game provides you with a few additional steps to tackle. Alongside the primary task—to dig, develop, and to create a network of mining sites that you can eventually automate and deploy as part of a greater ecosystem—you also have several other projects that require your constant attention, which includes hunting animals for furs, trophies, and meat, as well as creating fresh buildings to host mining alumni, and taking the necessary steps to enhance tools, support beams and other useful skills. To add, you have a plot with a solid collection of side quests and characters, and a rolling stockpile of needs to keep tabs on—hunger, warmth, and so on and so forth.

With all of the above taken into account, you have a huge slice of content to carve through here, with not just a basic mining experience to juggle, but an entire host of business affairs, automated infrastructures, and survivalist operations, too. And of course, this all sounds brilliant on paper—a jack-of-all-trades sim that caters to both loot-filled mining and external chore hopping. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that, at least when combined, it all meshes together in an orderly fashion to create one well-oiled machine. Or does it? Let’s dig a little deeper.

While there’s clearly no denying that Alaska Gold Fever has a vast number of things to do in its world, that doesn’t quite excuse the fact that, at least from a technical standpoint, it’s still a fair ways from being a great game with near-perfect gameplay. Case in point, the game often suffers from a concerning amount of mid-game jitters and poor frame drops. Likewise, it often struggles to make simple tasks like operating a sled or, well, moving feel like a bit of a slog. To call it wooden might be an exaggeration, but I will say that, once you begin to settle your cravings for the content, it does become awfully difficult to turn a blind eye to the cracks in the pavement, so to speak. It’s sluggish, is the general consensus that I’m trying to convey here.

Let it be said that, aside from its poor optimization  and general lack of post-game technical polish, Alaska Gold Fever does have some great bones, and not to mention a simple yet satisfying gameplay hook that can keep you occupied for the long haul. It’s still a rather slow experience that can sometimes test your patience, but with the addition of various jobs and business affairs, it does provide a good variety of areas to explore outside of the general mining process. Also, it’s a lot better than your average digging game á la A Game About Digging a Hole, in that it asks more questions and forces you to ponder the aspects that other games of its kind failed to incubate.

Of course, Alaska Gold Fever still adopts most or the same generic fixtures, such as tool upgrades, types of gold, and a skill tree that allows you to experiment with various smelting practices and what have you. Though, it does make an effort to fill your head with more possibilities, thus making the journey more of a multi-step procedure and not, for example, a volleying maneuver with little to no curveballs to help break up what would otherwise be a monotonous graft. Again, it’s a slow game that will certainly test you, but if you can stick around long enough to witness the fruits of your labor, then it can become a gratifying experience with a lot of great rewards. It’s just a shame that its lack of optimization drags it down ever so slightly.

Verdict

Alaska Gold Fever aims to take a huge chunk out of several genres and formulate its own prospects with the loot, with a crafting-survival nugget on the one hand, and a gold-based business simulation flake on the other. And for the most part, it works. Content-wise, there’s a lot to dig your knuckles into, with a ton of quests, side jobs, and not to mention an entire host of automation tasks, survival-oriented projects, and hunting exploits, to list just a few of its many, many nuggets of gold. To that end, you could argue that the amount of material justifies the price tag here. And it does, truly, as it delivers a heck of a lot more than most mining sims of its kind. The question is, does it favor quantity over quality?

Sadly, Alaska Gold Fever does have its fair share of issues, both technical and graphical. Aside from its poor optimization and lack of fluidity in its gameplay mechanics, it can feel like a tricky game to master. Don’t get me wrong, the world has more than enough to offer you, with a steady flow of quests and jobs to keep your mind occupied whilst you whittle through the mines and unlock better upgrades for your tools. That being said, to call Alaska Gold Fever a game that’s nearing its gold standard might be a bit of an understatement. In time, perhaps. As it stands, though, it appears that there is still a bit of work left to accomplish before it can be smelted down into a jewel.