Gold Rush! was an edutainment game made in 1988, published by Sierra. It's not a great game, but it has an odd charm about it. Basically, it tries to educate the players on the great California gold rush while you play as Jerrod Wilson, who heads out to the west after receiving a letter from his brother, who left for California many years ago. Surprisingly enough, the game was remade, rather poorly, in 2014. It honestly wasn't the kind of a game I ever thought would be remade, but it was. And then, more surprisingly, the same developer made a sequel to the first game in 2017.
This time around, there was no prior game to base the design on, but the creator of the original game, Doug MacNeill, did take part in designing Gold Rush! 2. Not that it brings any charm or nostalgic vibrations to this rather poorly made game.
It has been a couple of decades since Jerrod and his brother Jake found each other again and stroke it rich by finding the biggest gold vein in California. They receive a message from Jerrod's old friend, Quail, who tells that William Tweed, the criminal who framed Jake and forced him to escape from Brooklyn, is causing problems in the city. Jake tells he collected evidence against Tweed before his escape, so the brothers decide to sell their mine and head back home to exonerate Jake and get Tweed behind bars.
The first part of Gold Rush! 2 takes place in California, where you need to find means to protect your gold aborad your private train carts. After this, you have a train trip through the USA, during which you have to fend off robbers after your life and gold. And finally, back in Brookly, you need to find Quail and provide the needed evidence to get Tweed behind bars.
Gold Rush! wasn't a great game as such, but it was at least meticulous in trying to teach you about the California gold rush. It offered you several different ways of getting to California as well as it tried to portray the problems and dangers of each method of traveling there. While it was annoying to die randomly on scurvy during a boat trip, it was a real danger and a teachable moment. It was, after all, more of an educational story than a game. Gold Rush! 2 has very little of that, despite you can still die. There's no educational value in death here.
Now, there is some educational stuff in Gold Rush! 2, but it mainly happens during the overly long train journey in the transcontinental train Jake and Jerrod hitch their private cabins. In between smacking the bandits, the narrator explains stuff about the train track and the locations they go through. It all feels like a rather poorly done lecture, not an interactive educational experience. The gameplay moments are used in solving rather easy puzzles that have no educational value to speak of. The original game had you at least figuring out what were the most important things to take with you, here you just kind of follow the flow of a linear journey.
The worst design choice of Gold Rush! 2 is the attempt of padding the game with its opening section in California. There's actually very little to do there, but the game does make you aimlessly wander through empty, boring landscapes. I'd say 90% of the scenes are pointless for the game itself, meant only as padding and to confuse the player in thinking the game is bigger than it is. The train journey is slow, despite being only a couple of screens long, as most of it consists of rather bland historical tidbits narrated by a disinterested sounding narrator and a poorly written chase story, where Jerrod has to thwart the robber train following their train several times. The last part in Boston is really the most straightforward, but it also has dropped the most pretense of any educational value.
What it all comes down to, really, is that Gold Rush! 2 is a poorly written and designed game. I can't even really fathom why it exists, as, unlike the first game, it has no genuine educational value and as a game, it's just a lazy, badly written epilogue that rehashes most of its locations from the previous game, while offering vastly simplified structure. At times you play or see something, that makes you ask for whom it was made for, and I with Gold Rush! 2, I have no idea at all. If there was any idea behind the game at all, it is so slim, that it's hardly visible.
I can't really recommend Gold Rush! 2 for anyone. Even if you are a fan of the original game, hell, even if you are a fan of the rather inferior remake, there's really nothing of interest on the offer here. The most generous thing you can call Gold Rush! 2 is shovelware. Just get the original Sierra game, it's warts and all, still a superior game.
Gold Rush! 2 can be bought from Steam. Though why'd you want to do that is beyond me.
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