Gold Rush: The Game

Oh... close to 500hours already? Man time sure flies by, eh?
Okay. Time to review this old hunkajunk.
If you want to play a game to relax and enjoy digging up dirt, you won't find anything better. Neither older nor younger than this game. Period.
Buuuuuut, let's hop into our usual process:
We start with Graphics!
Does it look breathtaking and stunning?
Weeeell... yes, in a sense it does. If you expect a title this old to be on par with current gen GPU eyecandy, it sure will take away your breath while you gasp in horror.
For real, way back when it released, it looked pretty decent and even today it looks acceptable.
Sure, you see that it's old but so what? It IS an old game.
You play minecraft and enjoy looking at clunky cubes but complain over seeing edges in another game? Get lost, now will ya.
For how old it is it gets a solid 3/5 Stars in this department.
Next... next... Sound!
Do you love big machines? Yes? Well, you will enjoy them good over here.
Turning the excavator, digging up the dirt, scraping the ground with the teeth of it's bucket, it is all well enough designed to keep you diggin on with glee.
Ambient sounds are okayish, too.
The sounds of the working washplants and water are excellent, albeit too loud if you're too close to them while working.
Well, one could argue "Well, duh! Standing next to a jackhammer IS loud, no?" and indeed, it is a minor grape mostly due to dreaded realism! haha! didn't see that one coming in a simulator.
taking the age into account again...
4/5 Stars.
Off we go tooooo GAMEPLAY!!!
I have a glas of diiiirt! I have a glas of diiiirt!
Jack would jump in endless joy for sure.
The Dirtmechanics are top notch. There are a few problems with how the different layers of dirt work if you dig from the ground up and I dunno if the gripes with that ever got fixed, but overall despite loosing some of the gold because of it, terrain deformation, dirt transport etc all are god damn good.
I mean... I shovelled megatons of dirt for almost 500 hours by now so trust me, It either is god damn marverllous or I'm a bonafide Masochist.
Or both? You'll never know *grin*
Besides playing around with dirt... well... that's it. It is a dig around in dirt and get Gold Simulator. There's nothing else to simulate.
The Machines work, the mechanics how the machines work are implemented well and albeit a tad bit tedious at times, the process of refining your paydirt into a sellable Goldbar over several Steps in between still feels rewarding after millions of times doing it.
Yupp, I'm doing it. Stop screaming, I'm doing it!
5/5 Stars! For what it claims to be and do, no other game reached a comparable good feeling about it. Yet!
Last but not least: BUGSSSSSSSS! *insert meme here*
Let's be honest folks.
Yes, the game is plagued by some bugs and those are like cockroaches. Is it bad for a several years old game to have bugs since ancient times plagueing it? yes.
But, to it's defense, the game went through several hands by now.
The new Devs try their best to mitigate what they can in a spaghetti code not even the original writer ever wanted to touch again after the game made it into a working version somehow.
So... I give the new Devs 3/5 Stars for their effort to straddle through this code swamp they didn't even produced and bring some QoL and Bugfixes as best they can, while working on the Successor with hopefully better maintained code and features.
Where does that leave us overall?
Well, The game is the best gold mining simulator out there. No pun intended.
It is old, clunky and not without bugs even after all its years in existence, but if you love mining, it is the undefeated King in its field.
We settle at not fully 4/5 Stars.
It is almost constant in a sale nowadays so go and get it.
If you encounter a bug, shrug it off. Happens and compared to current AAA Games, this old clunker is way less bugridden, then those abominations the big publishers call Releases anyways.

good gameplay, but the game could use a multiplayer feature

pretty damn fun game... would love to see this game redone with some better graphics more maps etc. pretty realistic.

This is a great game from 2017. It has a bit of a learning curve but pretty easy once you get going. It's in need of a 2025 upgrade and multi-player but that's what we are getting with Gold Mining simulator 2. This is always on sale and the DLCs are worth it.
This game will require a grind so if you expect to have millions of dollars after one cleanout, you might want to go play something else. It's pretty much everything you could ask for in a gold mining simulator, minus some extra help from your friends!

340 hours in and i have to say what this game really needs in GMS2 is multiplayer and a group finder function for random groups. Also it needs overburden to be stripped. maybe different claims with different amounts of overburden, so there is an expense to mining the claim with heavy equipment, and a reason to have a bulldozer in the game. the overburden could also have some being more muddy, so a vehicle can get stuck, and some that needs to be ripped etc. also if were going to add multiplayer, it should still be as satisfying solo with AI workers ingame that can be set to run specific tasks.... ( like the farming simulator mod that lets you program tasks or routes for AI to work fields etc)

Honestly, I love the game, even if I rarely play it, but it's got a major issue in my eyes, it's strictly singleplayer, this game would be made easily my top game if this were an experience I could enjoy with a couple of buddies, share goals, and have everyone running specific equipment to keep the mine running, it'd just be a 100% more enjoyable experience if it were multiplayer of up to like, 4 or 5 guys

Very fun alot of things you can do in this game and its in depth like the tv show. Cons the city is kinda dead its just you out there it gets kinda spooky. Great game other then that.