Pure confidence is putting a ‘1’ at the end of your game title. That says “we know we’re making a second game, you can’t stop us”. We like the confidence.
Of course, this being an 8floor Games title, the chance of a sequel is incredibly high. Their Gnomes Garden series is up to its eighth iteration, and they’ve got a number of others that are well beyond a second game. So, maybe it’s not that ballsy.
We’ve been known to be critical of 8floor Games ‘churn them out’ strategy. Virtually every month, they release a new stripped back city-management sim onto the Xbox. We were tempted to put ‘new’ in inverted commas, as their games are very much copycats of each other. They just vary in theme, story and the number of bugs they introduce. So, you can imagine the faint feelings of dread when Argonauts Agency 1: Golden Fleece arrived.
We needn’t have been worried. Because Argonauts Agency 1: Golden Fleece is not only a step forward from anything the publisher has put out in the past twelve months, it’s their best game full stop. Why this hasn’t been the template all along, we don’t know, but we can say one thing for certain: if you’ve ever been curious about all these Gnomes-Garden-and-friends titles, this is the one you should start with. Of course, the other games will be a disappointment in comparison, but at least you’ll have a decent first taste.
The opening moments offer a few clues that 8floor Games have got it right with this one. While Jason and his Argonauts themselves are a little uncanny and creepy, their game world is colourful and easy to read. We’ve been dragging ourselves through the relentlessly brown Royal Roads, and Argonauts Agency 1: Golden Fleece is blinding technicolour in comparison. Resources, buildings and characters are all easy to read, rather than camouflaged with the background. Again, bonus.
Then there’s the story, which bucks the publisher’s trend by being readable and brief. Gone are the acres of illegible, poorly translated text; in comes some throwaway guff about the Golden Fleece being stolen and Jason and the Argonauts acting as a kind of Private Investigation Agency to get them back. Sure, it does the usual and hops from one potential suspect to another, rather than developing anything you would call ‘plot’, but it’s short enough to finish in a few seconds, and you can get right into the management meat.
Whisper it, but the gameplay in Argonauts Agency 1: Golden Fleece is actually enjoyable to the point of being, welp, addictive. The previous games in the many other series have always been a butt of our jokes, mainly because they’re so willfully boring and simple in comparison to games like Age of Empires or Cities: Skylines. But in Argonauts Agency 1: Golden Fleece, we finally observe what 8floor Games have been trying to achieve.
Gone are the interminable waits for resources. You’re not saving up for minutes so that you can bypass a puddle in the road. Argonauts Agency 1: Golden Fleece is impeccably balanced so that you are always riding the curve: there is no downtime at all, and as long as you are on top of your upgrades and cursor management, you will be collecting resources, removing blockages, building mills and completing objectives. It’s a merry chain of actions.
It’s a small change but massive for Argonauts Agency 1: Golden Fleece. So many small, incremental shifts make this feeling possible. There’s less emphasis on upgrading buildings, as that always stuck you into a loop of managing the same small space of the game board. Blockages only take a few resources to clear, while buildings pump out resources at a decent rate. And there’s precious few distractions that stretch out the game time. There are no orcs stealing your stuff, or trolls that are needed to speed up production. Everything flows.
It means that you churn through levels in Argonauts Agency 1: Golden Fleece at about twice the speed of the other 8floor Games, and boy does it feel good. To ensure you don’t whip through the game like a stiff breeze, the number of levels has been upped. There are 65 here, when 50 is about par for the series (albeit with many of those chucking in some secret levels).
But the big bravos go to the cave levels and a complete absence of bugs. Let’s cover the bugs first, as we’re just thrilled to be talking about the polish for once. Argonauts Agency 1: Golden Fleece is smooth as a baby’s bottom. There are no UI issues, no save game problems, no uncompletable levels. The achievements even unlock properly. Better still, there is a surfeit of unlocks and difficulty options, allowing you to manage your experience. Argonauts Agency 1: Golden Fleece screams care and attention.
We’ve always been keen to slap the ‘copycat’ label on these games. But there’s one addition to Argonauts Agency 1: Golden Fleece that – hopefully – signals a growing taste for innovation. There is a sequence of levels that take place in the dark. You can only see so far, with lit beacons forcing you to work within confined routes. But through gathering resources you can light further beacons in a particular direction and unlock what’s there.
It adds something that these games have never had: surprise and delight. One beacon might unlock a series of blocked paths, and you realise you’ve wasted the resources to illuminate them. But another beacon might uncover a motherlode of stuff. Suddenly you’re going all Supermarket Sweep and shoving all the resources in your shopping trolley. We wished there were more of these levels – it’s just one of a few regions – but while they were around, Argonauts Agency 1: Golden Fleece jumped up a tier.
For all our enthusiasm, we should be clear that Argonauts Agency 1: Golden Fleece isn’t some kind of revelation: it’s not suddenly turning this series of games into a colossus of the Xbox Store. It’s still low on strategy, low on depth and achingly unmodern with its slow cursor. There’s every chance that Paradox players, or anyone with some city management sim experience, will turn their nose up.
But we’ve pumped an unearthly number of hours into these 8floor Games titles, and we’re just happy to finally say ‘this one is worth playing’. We might have got carried away: if you’ve never played one of these titles before, you can probably shave a half mark off the score. But if you have played them before, and you’ve grown frustrated that 8floor Games never seem to release a coherent, bug-free and ambitious title, then stop the Argo for a moment. Argonauts Agency 1: Golden Fleece is the one.
