Review: Doloc Town
- Guilherme Ribeiro
- 16 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Help Doloc thrive once again.
THE GAME
Doloc Town is a casual farming game developed by RedSaw Games Studio and distributed by Logoi Games and Pathea Games. In a post-apocalyptic world, our young protagonist finds Doloc, a small village facing difficulties. It is in this situation that our protagonist settles in the town and starts her own farm, helping Doloc to prosper again. Besides farming, you can raise animals and collect resources, as well as control drones that will help you both in battle and in tending to your crops. Help Doloc and its inhabitants so that everyone can live better in a devastated world.
MY IMPRESSIONS
The experience of having an entire world to explore and diverse mechanics to learn sums up what games where you manage a farm and help the town's population are all about. Doloc Town, however, subverts the standard idea, creating a vertical, 2D game without losing the genre's usual mechanics. This idea works very well with the presented world, where everything is abandoned and almost everything is built from scrap and repurposed resources, creating very well-designed vertical environments and constructions. Resource gathering is essential for building your equipment, as well as for selling it. Weather conditions are very important in Doloc Town, directly influencing your crops and even your machines, since in addition to regular rain, thunderstorms can damage your buildings if there isn't a lightning rod to protect and even collect energy, just as acid rain can corrode structures and destroy unprotected crops. Doloc Town expects the player to always use the acquired resources to maximize efficiency and protect against potential weather problems. Unlocking new recipes and machines will always depend on consistently using all your proficiencies, generating points that can be spent to unlock more options. The game's art is very beautiful, with beautifully animated 2D art and a color palette that perfectly matches the game's atmosphere, where the world is devastated and everything seems to have lost its color.
The city of Doloc is alive, with all residents having their importance and availability schedule. They will help you by selling resources, food, seeds, equipment, drones, and even constructions. Missions are also available on the city's notice board, serving to help residents and receive rewards for doing so. And of course, you can improve your friendship level with everyone in Doloc by gifting them things they like. Doloc Town has a story that revolves around how to make that town prosper again, with some mysteries lingering in the city. The game is in Brazilian Portuguese, which makes it much easier to follow the story, as well as greatly helping to understand the game's mechanics, which are numerous. You'll have to venture into forests and other environments surrounding Doloc in search of better resources to progress further. In some cases, hostile enemies will try to hinder your adventure, so you'll use a drone as your main weapon against them. This drone can usually be customized with various types of weapons. Despite being your main weapon, it has a battery that is consumed with each attack, but it regenerates automatically or can be instantly recharged using batteries. Drones are also important for your farm, as they can be used to automate specific tasks. And if drones weren't enough, you can also have a flying motorcycle. If that's not cool, then I don't know what is.
Collecting resources, cultivating plants, fishing, mining, caring for animals, defeating enemies—in short, all sorts of activities possible in this genre of game revolve around larger objectives, where the reconstruction and improvement of Doloc is central. There's so much to do and so many new resources appearing that you won't even notice the time passing. You unlock a new tool or piece of equipment that allows you to do something new, and then you discover a new feature, which unlocks the possibility of creating something new, and so on. Despite this, Doloc Town lets the player do everything at their own pace, without pressure, allowing them to enjoy everything the game has to offer.
ACHIEVEMENTS
In a game with so many diverse activities, it's to be expected that your achievements will also be quite varied. You'll have achievements related to all aspects of the game, from simple actions that happen naturally to others that require battles or reaching specific milestones such as money amount or number of fish caught. Some achievements require the player to, in a way, fail at certain activities, which is a practice I don't particularly appreciate, since failure generally shouldn't be encouraged, even if it can happen naturally. Overall, my advice is that the player enjoys the game to the fullest, explores every existing mechanic and scours every corner of the map, and eventually, when you feel there's nothing left to do, go after what's missing to get 100% of the achievements.
CONCLUSION
I had fun and continue to have fun with Doloc Town. Each game session is light, in the sense that I don't notice the time passing and I don't feel pressured to rush things, even though there's a lot to do and I end up losing focus several times. However, this doesn't get in the way, and the game itself allows you to tackle larger goals in stages. The game's story falters a bit by trying to explain too much, in a very tiring and unappealing way. It won't excite you, but it doesn't bother you either. It's amazing how you can't stay still in Doloc Town; you'll always have something to do, and I think that's great because it keeps the game alive at all times. Even though things get a little easier as the game progresses, it's rewarding to see things gradually evolving. I was missing a good farming game in my life, and Doloc Town managed to fill that void.
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