Go Go Town - Building Automation Coop

What is Go Go Town?

You build up a town by creating houses for people to live in and shops for tourists to buy stuff. At first you’ll be doing a lot of the hard work yourself, but eventually you’ll be able to assign workers to automate the tasks for you.

And it’s that last part which is nice to see. We have so many games on the market where the automation comes from technology. The world of gaming is full of conveyor belts and manufactories. There are so few games where “humans” are the automatons. Watching them go around and cut trees, carry logs, turn it into goods, and eventually transport it to where it needs to be. Whether that’s to construct a new building or to be sold in a shop.

I wish you could set what was stored in storage so you could create a clean and tidy system.

I wish there was more freedom in the map and how you choose to expand. Like maybe giving you 8 different shop types to start with and you get to pick how you want to start. Maybe you focus on arts and crafts goods, or foods, or electronics.

Resources and Manufacturing

Your town has four dedicated resource locations. A mining, foresting, farming, and fishing zone. It’s here where you will get all of the resources you need to construct buildings, fill your shops, and decorate your town with interactive objects.

The zones are also where you produce goods. Turning wood into planks and then into window frames is all done in the forestry zone.

At first you’ll be the one doing all the hard work, but the goal is to have lots of people do all the work for you! They’ll carry goods from one place to another and maintain a tidy town!

Towns People

In the day, humans will visit your city. At night, Ghosts and Werewolves? So there’s almost always people around your town to keep it lively. Everyone arrives and departs by train.

You can high five tourists and townspeople to make them happy, or if you want bump into them with a car to make them anti-happy. It’s a simple system. To level up your town though you’ll want to make them happy, unfortunately.

To increase the population of your town, you’ll have to complete some mini-quests. The quests are static and don’t change if you make a new game. Stuff like build 6 lampposts, knock over 25 people, construct a building you already built accidentally, and so on…

You don’t even need to house these people right away. You can house them later. Which is a bit weird, but who knows what future plans the game may have. It’s in a good state now as it is, so it’s exciting to see the ‘base’ game offering a great experience.

No Problems

So often in colony building games you encounter troublesome AI. They do one thing wrong and it completely collapses your delicate fragile little ecosystem.

Go-Go Town is a great example that you don’t need to live on the edge to just have fun. Expanding your town, even when you don’t have complete freedom on how you expand, is still enjoyable. It’s about watching your citizens interact with what you’ve placed and where you’ve placed it.

There is a problem with things working so smoothly though, and that’s the lack of creativity of how things work. There is very little you can do to optimize your production lines. The best you can do is place shops nearer to the resources that stock the shops. Say you need lots of concrete quickly! There’s nothing you can do to boost production through automation except doing it yourself manually.

Sometimes there are times where you are just waiting around for the next unlock, and maybe this would have been a good time to reflect on how you’ve made your town and see what you could do better. Or at the very least maybe have a bed to sleep in to skip some time.

Empty Town

At first it feels like your town is growing into something bustling, but it comes to a point where you’ve got more buildings that people. There are more shops than customers. There are far more resources cluttering your stockpiles than what you want with very little in the way of offloading them.

In the following clip, this is quite an ‘active’ town. I think it could do with a little… more action around. Maybe some queues for shops!

https://youtu.be/km-6phxRS7I

Music

The music is jamming. At first it feels like a mismatch but then the pace of the game starts to sit with the beats.

There aren’t many music tracks, but I suppose some folk would describe these as “absolute bangers!”

Replayability

There’s the concern though. Since the creative freedom of how you progress is restricted like so many building games. “Build this thing, then this thing, now you have to wait for those buildings to produce to be able to unlock the next thing.”

But does it have to be replayable? Well… maybe not. It’d certainly make for a better game and I’m not complaining about Go-Go Town. What I am saying is there is a game out there still yet to be made! Go-Go Town is the pudding of proof of a whole meal!

Restrictions Apply

It’s a little confusing when you want to improve your production but you can’t build more of the thing you need. Want to produce more crops? Make more farm plots! Only… you can’t!

Everything is limited to begin with. You only have 5 farm plots. You can only make 4 houses. You can only build 1 chainsaw.

Later on this changes and you can get as much as you want using a whole new currency. It’s just a little confusing at the start having that level of control taken away from you.

Final Summary

It’s an enjoyable little game to give a try! It’s early access and it’s showing signs of being very strong! This is a great opener!

The game will give you lots to do, but you are following a pre-built path that is laid down before you. Which isn’t much different to many other similar titles.

Atmospherically, it’s good! It’s a big tick on the vibe check. The online and offline co-op work a treat and there’s no complaints there!

The best thing it could currently do to improve the game is add more player controls to it’s logistic systems.

Setting storage to only store certain items would help a lot to make the player feel like they have some control.