A Misfiring Attempt at Those Fishing Games you see Down the Arcade
If you’ve walked into an amusement arcade in the past ten years, you’ve likely seen a game similar to Golden Traverse. More often than not, they’re fishing themed: cabinets like Big Sea Fishing or Treasure Cove. A fishing rod or harpoon swings backwards and forwards in a semi-circle, and you have to tap a big flashing button with impeccable timing so that it jabs forward and impales a fish. Whoever has the biggest pile of fish at the end of a time limit is the winner. Coupons pour out of the machine and tickle your shins.
Golden Traverse is an attempt to bring this kind of experience to console – just without tokens and a different theme. Instead of fishing, Golden Traverse opts for mining. Harpoons and fishing rods are replaced with a claw. Tap the A button at various points in the claw’s arc, and you’ll be grabbing gems, gold, prairie dogs and TNT.
An Arcade Experience, and it’s all Mine
I was in the mood for Golden Traverse. I wanted a bit of simple, one-button gameplay. I like those arcade machines I mentioned, but I didn’t fancy paying £1 a time for the privilege. So, I was genuinely up for Golden Traverse, and my expectations weren’t even that high – about knee level. But Golden Traverse couldn’t even manage to claw its way over that low bar. I’m sad to say that it’s a poor replacement for the fishing machines in your local arcade.
First off, there’s no multiplayer or game modes in Golden Traverse. There’s only one way to play, and that’s single-player through a kind of roguelike campaign. A lack of multiplayer is something of a miss: competing against other players is the beating heart of these games, and playing by yourself isn’t anywhere near as fun.
Having a single game mode is also somewhat disappointing. This has the makings of a score-attack game, and not being able to notch a highscore, for example, is another missed opportunity. You can’t play on different difficulties, or an endless mode.
Each level is on a sixty-second timer, and you have to prioritise the gold and gems over the $1 rocks (easier said than done when the rocks are often bigger and blocking the more lucrative ores). If you manage to hit a $ threshold by the end of the minute, then you’re onto the next level.
Coming Apart at the Seams
This objective would be fine if it wasn’t farcical. At the end of Golden Traverse, we had nearly $100,000 in the kitty, yet the last level required that we had $3,000. Now, we’d love to say that we are so unbelievably good at Golden Traverse that the $97k difference was justified, but we really aren’t. Something is deeply broken with the objectives: it’s just far too easy to achieve them on every level. We expect a patch will solve this problem.
That lack of challenge leaves a hole where motivation should be. There is nothing to test yourself against. All you can do is treat Golden Traverse as a cosy experience, and – unfortunately – it’s here where it falters too.
Almost all of Golden Traverse’s thirty levels are virtually identical. Gold nuggets hide in the lower reaches of the game screen, while the more worthless rocks are at the top. That makes sense – gold nuggets at the top of the screen would be pointless – but it doesn’t give the designers much to work with.
There are some obstacles that get stirred into the mix, but there aren’t enough of them. TNT barrels will explode if your claw touches them, and they’ll take precious rocks with them when they go. Prairie dogs move on a patrol route and they’re either worthless or worthwhile (some have gems in their teeth, you see). But that’s all she wrote: there isn’t anything else to really distinguish the levels.
Power ups That Don’t Convincingly Power you up
Arguably, variety comes in the form of power-ups that you can buy before each level. You can buy gems which appear in the subsequent layout, or remove rocks. Strength lets you reel in rocks at speed, while bombs can detonate a rock mid-pull, getting it out of the way quickly.
In another game, these power-ups would have been a tempting option. But here you don’t need them: the level thresholds are so effortless to achieve that they will only make you ‘win more’. They’re also a complicated proposition, since they are bought with the same currency as the thresholds themselves. How much $ value will I get from removing rocks or adding gemstones? Will the cost make their purchase worthwhile? It’s hard to know.
It feels like I am beating Golden Traverse while it’s down, but there’s more. You see, there isn’t much opportunity to show off your skills. I wanted to make a pinpoint shot, slipping my claw between two rocks to grasp a gold nugget in the dying seconds. But the collision detection is so wishy-washy that this never happened. The claw locks onto nearby targets, meaning that an accurate shot will likely just grab a rock further up. Levels became a war of attrition rather than skill, as I would clear the upper rocks before moving onto the lower gems.
Which is all to say that Golden Traverse didn’t scratch my arcade itch. It never really got close. I wanted that Big Sea Fishing-like experience, and thought it would be a simple enough task to achieve it. But everything, from the level objectives to the collision detection to the variety in the levels was deeply wrong.
I guess I’m back to saving up the £1 coins and popping over to Great Yarmouth for my arcade needs. It says a lot that I would have preferred to keep the £4 I handed over for Golden Traverse so that I could have spent it there.
Important Links
Buy from the Xbox Store, optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/golden-traverse-xbox-series/9MXS33CRH3LX/0010
