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cover-Go-Go Town!

Monday, July 22, 2024 9:30:34 PM

Go-Go Town! Review (Khajiit)

Unfortunately, nothing about this game works for me.
Lots of reviews compare it to Animal Crossing, but aside from the aesthetic there is no similarity. This is basically Sim Theme Park, or any of the other tycoon games from the 90s/early 00s, with slightly different mechanics. Most notably, you control an avatar instead of being an omnipresent manager, and there is more emphasis on setting up production chains to supply the shops in your town with materials. This could be such a fun game with a little rejiggering, but as it is, this game is unfortunately bogged down by too much tedium. I'll go over the problems with the game design as I see it.
1) Having an avatar is pointless. Most of your time is spent being a teamster; that is, running supplies from one location to another. You can mine, fish, and craft materials, but I think the game devs know that this is tedious work because they let the game automate all of this for you on only your second tier of expansions. (Fishing in this game is NOT a minigame like it is in Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, and similar games. It's more tedious push-button-to-collect-resource in front of a water tile.)
2) This game emphasizes supply chains, but it gives you really poor tools for setting them up. Basically you craft machines that can turn raw materials into other things, and you can have employees working there, but you can't designate where to put the output for the machines, or tell them to make X number of materials, which shops or market stalls to send the materials, or really do any of things you'd expect to be able to do with an assembly line. You are often feeding the machines and collecting their output manually because the workers aren't efficient enough to keep you supplied. Vending machines and market stalls must always be stocked by the player, the delivery drivers won't do it.
3) The ticket system is bonkers. To buy decorations and buildings for your town, you don't use money, you use tickets. You obtain tickets by exporting goods. The problem with that is, as I addressed previously, this means you're going to be manually collecting materials from your crafting machines because the workers and delivery people in the game don't do it very efficiently. So even though I have over $1,000 in the bank, if I want to buy more park benches for my town, I can't just buy them - I have to run back and forth between the crafting machines and the export building to send stuff off so I can get tickets to buy park benches, trees, fences, etc. It's both tedious and nonsensical. Why can't I just buy what I want? Maybe use the tickets to unlock new decorations, or more extravagant buildings, but using tickets as the main currency to buy objects in the games just doesn't make any sense to me.
4) Shallow management mechanics. You have to build houses for your workers to get them to stay in the town, but beyond that... You don't need to keep them happy. They don't have skills or aptitudes that make them better for one type of work over another. They don't actually use their houses, they stay in their shops 24/7. You aren't scored on the beauty of your town, you don't need any facilities to keep townsfolk happy, its all tourism centered, and I think it'd be basically impossible to upset the tourists. They don't have individual needs or desires like some tycoon games. Maybe this will be expanded on later, I don't know. Personally I would enjoy the game a lot more if it was more focused on managing the town and its workforce, and less on the tedium of collecting materials and transporting them where they need to go.
This game is very cute, and very polished, but that's about all I can say for it. Designing my town would be a lot of fun if I didn't have the headache of having to collect tickets to build things. I think this game needs a major revamp to focus in on what it does well and cut out the tedium. Allowing the player to hire more delivery drivers or have more control over the supply chains would already go a long way, but I would honestly go as far as making the avatar optional and giving you a god's eye view of the town instead.