I don't write reviews very often, but after putting 62.3 hours into this game, earning 100% of the achievements, and mining out every single mine on the map, I felt like this one deserved it.

Alaska Gold Fever was exactly the kind of game I was looking for.

You arrive in town after your Uncle Ben passes away and leaves you his old hotel deep in the Alaskan Gold Rush frontier. From there, it's up to you to build your business empire while living the life of a prospector.

If you're like me and enjoy relaxing, grindy games where you can gather resources for hours, this game absolutely delivers. I love chopping trees, mining ore, crafting, and especially anything involving gold mining. This game scratched every one of those itches.

The mining loop is incredibly satisfying. You dig dirt, sift it for gold, iron, and magnesium, then clean and smelt your gold into bars to sell. Iron becomes a core crafting material for tools and buildings, while magnesium is used to repair and upgrade the highest-tier picks and axes. It all ties together really well and constantly gives you something to work toward.

One thing I completely missed at the beginning—and I wish I had known sooner—is that you can repair your tools at the crafting stations. Open your inventory and press F on the tool in the left-hand window. Once I figured that out... it was game on.

The business management was another huge highlight for me. You eventually own three different businesses, each with their own upgrades and progression:

Your uncle's hotel, which you expand and improve.
A goat farm that produces milk, leather, and meat for crafting, cooking, and selling. Once it's running, you'll never worry about leather again.
A mine where you can hire workers to gather resources while you're off doing other things.

For someone who enjoys gathering, farming, and slowly building up an operation, this progression felt incredibly rewarding.

I almost didn't buy this game because of some of the reviews I had read beforehand, but my experience was almost the complete opposite. I didn't run into the performance issues others mentioned. If I noticed any frame drops at all, it was usually after leaving the game running for 10–12 hours straight, and a quick restart fixed it every time.

The only real bug I encountered involved the dog sled. If you slammed into objects or drove over terrain it clearly wasn't meant to handle, the sled could slowly become tilted and look pretty strange. Thankfully, recalling the dogs to a dog house or simply returning to the main menu fixed it every time.

At this point, my only complaint is that I've simply run out of things to do. I've finished everything the game currently has to offer, and that's honestly a good problem to have.

Now I'm just sitting here waiting for the Bandits DLC and the moonshine update.

Mining. Gold. Moonshine.

What more could you ask for?

Chef's kiss.

If you enjoy relaxing resource gathering, crafting, management, and satisfying progression, I highly recommend giving this game a chance. It completely exceeded my expectations, and I can't wait to jump back in when more content releases.

Horrible optimization, half of mechanics aren't working properly, broken economic.

leaving this due to adding dlc for a game with hardly any content in it at launch