Rewind to a year ago: I had played the early access version of Go-Go Town! and was writing a preview of it for this very website, and I wondered: who would want to be a mayor? You see, this cute game by Prideful Sloth forces you into the role, as you are literally dumped into an inhabitable area with the challenge of building it up to become the best town around. Obviously, that comes with a lot of responsibility and quite the number of challenges. But if being a mayor in real life is anything like it is here, I will gladly put myself forward in an election, because goddamn this is fun!
You start off the game with barely anything in your town, besides areas for mining, foresting, fishing, and farming; these are the places where you’ll get the resources you need to build all of your amenities. You’ll want to start building quickly, as new people keep on arriving through the town’s train station: some of them are just tourists, but others might even want to stay and build a life in your quaint little village. Those who want to stay always need a little convincing: sometimes that means you just pay them some money, while at other times you’ll be building something like a store or a bench that makes them never want to leave.
Both types of visitors are important to your town: locals can be hired to work at either one of your resource areas or in one of your stores, while tourists will spend money and earn you an income. Earn enough money and expand your town enough, and you will rise up through the rankings! At each rank there will be challenges you are required to meet, and doing so means getting access to even more amenities. These can be purely cosmetic, but more often than not they’ll actually be useful: there will be more shops to earn a profit from, but you’ll also build accommodations that will fill your town’s visitors’ needs, like benches to rest on or rides for entertainment.
After a while, Go-Go Town! becomes all about creating synergies. Get enough people to live in your town so they can work for you and automatically gather resources, run your shops, etc. This will attract more tourists and potential new inhabitants, and thus the cycle continues. The people you attract are incredibly varied, by the way. Sure, there are regular people (with even a couple of them coming from other games like Dinkum), but there are also robots and even aliens who come to check out what your place is all about. And if that’s not enough, you also have your own house that you can expand and decorate, just to make your hometown really feel like home.
And the best thing about it: you can even play this in co-op, both local and online! This might not be the ideal move if you prefer micromanaging your whole town, but if you’re up for some fun (and maybe even some chaos), then inviting your friends to play is a sure bet for an incredibly cosy time, whether you’re racing each other, causing havoc with the tourists or just running the town as perfectly as you can.
The online co-op capability is just one of the updates that were made during the game’s two years in early access. There have been plenty of characters and items added with each of the game’s big updates, and obviously the developers wanted to add something extra for the 1.0 release as well. In the new Town Hall, you’ll find display cases for every kind of treasure you can find within the game. It’s a feature very reminiscent of the museums you can find in similar games, with the exception that you’re able to display your items outside of the Town Hall as well. Spruce up your entire town with every rare or even legendary item you can find!
Basically, what Go-Go Town! comes down to for me is what if something like Animal Crossing was put on steroids. Rather than playing for just a little while every day, you can play Go-Go Town! for hours on end, as you’ll constantly find something else that calls for your attention. Managing your town just feels deeply satisfying, especially when it scratches that ‘one more thing’ kind of itch. I often found myself continuing to play long after I had said I would stop, just because there was something or other that I still wanted to fix.
It helps that navigating the game just feels so smooth. You can just run around everywhere or use any of the many, many vehicles the game has to offer. My ride of choice was my trusty skateboard, with which I crashed into plenty of visitors and locals alike. The building menu also feels very intuitive to use, as do all of the menus you can access through your in-game smartphone. The pace at which the game unlocks new items and buildings for you feels well considered, as I never found myself bored or running out of ideas on what to do. On the contrary, at times the updates felt like they came a little too fast, as there were times when I opened new shops without the ability to actually sell anything because I did not have the necessary ingredients yet. But that might be a slight on my style of play, more so than on the game itself.
And anyway, it doesn’t even have to be a problem per se, as the game now has a creative mode as well, where you immediately have access to everything the game has to offer, and it’s up to you to just create your perfect town… or use it as a playground for you and your friends, of course. I’m not usually a fan of games that give you this much freedom, as I always get stuck on finding out what I want to do with all of these options, but Go-Go Town! really gives you more than enough to do without ever becoming overwhelming.
