El Dorado: The Golden City Builder is a strategy city builder from Hobo Bunch that lets you build your very own Mayan city in the jungles of the Jukatan. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth playing.
El Dorado: The Golden City Builder Review Overview
What is El Dorado: The Golden City Builder?
El Dorado: The Golden City Builder (El Dorado) is a strategy city builder inspired by the conquistador legend of a great city of gold. Step into the role of a settlement leader looking to build up their humble village into a city of legend. Guide your people into a golden age as you micro-manage their resources, production, and worship of the fickle gods. Survive the onslaught of their divine wrath as your borders expand and your influence spreads. Will you be the one to realize the legend of the golden city?
El Dorado: The Golden City Builder features:
⚫︎ Grid-based city and road construction
⚫︎ Unique god system for dynamic goals
⚫︎ Spanning jungle maps with abundant resources to plan around
⚫︎ Campaign Mode with 10 unique acts to play through
⚫︎ Sandbox Mode unlocked from the beginning
⚫︎ Milestone progression system
 Steam |
$15.29 |
El Dorado: The Golden City Builder Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Reverent, But Not Boring Milestone Tech Progression |
Janky Camera Controls Surprisingly High System Requirements Needs More Quality of Life Features |
El Dorado: The Golden City Builder Overall Score - 62/100
Despite the majesty of its legend and the sheer resplendence of its namesake, there isn’t anything grand about El Dorado: The Golden City Builder. The game suffers from dull city builder mechanics and a complete lack of logistical overview, compounded by janky camera controls and tedious gameplay. While the inclusion of gods and omens is a nice touch, it isn't enough to polish this game to a golden sheen. El Dorado may strive for greatness, but a golden city builder it is not.
El Dorado: The Golden City Builder Story - 5/10
Pinning down the story of El Dorado: The Golden City Builder is a challenge, mainly because it barely seems to have one. The general idea of transforming your village into a legendary golden city feels more like a vague goal than a real narrative. There's no clear throughline connecting the major advancements in your city either, which leaves the progression feeling rather disjointed. While this is a common issue in city builders, it doesn't make it any less disappointing.
El Dorado: The Golden City Builder Gameplay - 7/10
El Dorado’s city-building mechanics are quite basic and lack detailed micromanagement tools. However, they are functional and integrate well with the game’s unique Gods and Omens system. That said, I expected more from the Golden City than simple grid-based city-building—especially when even Cities: Skylines 2 offers a more advanced experience.
El Dorado: The Golden City Builder Visuals - 7/10
I can’t really complain about El Dorado’s visuals. They’re effective for the aesthetic they’re trying to evoke, but not to the point of over-stylization and irreverence to the real-life people this culture represents. That said, it’s surprisingly taxing to even a med-tier setup, so if you’re rocking something budget, this game might not be your speed.
El Dorado: The Golden City Builder Audio - 4/10
El Dorado’s music fits well with its theme and the culture it aims to evoke, combining jungle tunes with an earthy, ancient vibe. However, despite its authenticity, the soundtrack isn't particularly good or varied. While it won’t make your ears bleed, you might prefer muting the game's music while building your city and listening to some Sim City tracks instead.
El Dorado: The Golden City Builder Value for Money - 8/10
Although it has its flaws, El Dorado's modest $16 price tag isn't much to ask. Many of its shortcomings can be fixed in future updates, and I genuinely believe there's a good game with solid ideas waiting to emerge.
El Dorado: The Golden City Builder Review: Promises Gold, Delivers Bronze
I'll be honest, I had lofty expectations going in. As an enthusiast of ancient history and city builder games, El Dorado seemed like an ideal match for my interests. I envisioned a magnificent gilded city, ready to be constructed in this potential gem of a game. However, much like the Spanish conquistadors who concocted the myth of El Dorado,
I found myself chasing a city that didn’t exist. It wasn’t the allure of gold that clouded my vision of El Dorado; it was my disappointment.
I'll start by saying this city builder is at least decent. The fundamental mechanics are there, with its grid-based alignment and draw-on road systems. It’s not particularly inspired nor authentically reflective of the Mesoamerican cultures it seeks to evoke with its imagery, but it gets the job done. The structures themselves follow the basic archetypes seen in most city builders, including residential buildings, research facilities, resource-gathering centers, stockpiles, and a central hall. Again, nothing groundbreaking, but effective nonetheless.
The gold sheen starts to crack and tarnish when you delve into the game's micromanagement layers and find that they simply don't exist. There are no logistical overviews, charts, graphs, zoning tools, or statistical breakdowns of any kind—practical must-haves for any city builder worth its foundations. Without these features, you're merely placing buildings for the sake of aesthetics, aside from a few proximity limitations for some resource buildings.
I appreciate how relying on a resource's spawn location fosters inventive city layouts. However, the excitement wanes since there's no clear way to track what happens to a resource after it's collected. This limitation also stifles creativity in city planning, as there are no real benefits or drawbacks to placing people of different social classes near each other. As I mentioned before, you can place buildings almost anywhere, except when they need to be close to a resource.
Therein lies the problem with El Dorado. It began with promise and built itself up, but just as it was about to soar, it lost momentum. The game falters by failing to innovate beyond the basics and neglecting the essential element of city management: logistics. I'm tempted to say this game innovated nothing, but that wouldn't be fair. It does feature a God and Omen system, which could have been brilliant if it weren't overshadowed by the utter mediocrity of the game’s other systems.
The game’s God and Omen system is designed to capture the capricious nature of deities and their unpredictable whims. Within moments, they can switch from blessing you with resources to striking your buildings with lightning, all conveniently predicted by the Omen tab. You can prevent these disasters by offering the correct produce to the appropriate god and strategically placing their shrines to cover your entire city. It’s an excellent system that promotes thoughtful city planning; I just wish the rest of the game were equally inventive.
Visually, the game is quite appealing—perhaps excessively so. It has surprisingly high graphical requirements to run on high settings. While this is noted on the game's Steam page, the gap between what the game demands and what it delivers is as vast as the entire Yucatan. Some game’s are worth upgrading your system for; this isn’t one of them.
Audio-wise, it's best to keep this game muted. The music isn't terrible, but I prefer not hearing it while dealing with the game's awkward camera controls. It's a real shame because the overall vibe, with its deep jungle beats and ancient themes, is spot on. Unfortunately, authenticity alone doesn't cut it, as the soundtrack of this game clearly demonstrates.
Overall, El Dorado: The Golden City Builder falls short of the legend of its namesake. While it shines in its grasp of basic city-building mechanics, it lacks the innovation and overall fun factor needed to truly dazzle. The Gods and Omens mechanics are a standout idea, but they aren't enough to elevate the game beyond mediocrity. In the end, El Dorado proves to be nothing more than a city of fool's gold.
Pros of El Dorado: The Golden City Builder
| Things El Dorado: The Golden City Builder Got Right |
|---|
|
Reverent, But Not Boring Milestone Tech Progression |
Reverent, But Not Boring
El Dorado: The Golden City Builder is many things, but it is neither irreverent nor derivative. The game takes great care to avoid over-stylizing its buildings and steers clear of stereotypical depictions of Mesoamerican cultures, such as human sacrifice. Instead of perpetuating the colonial myth of "El Hombre Dorado" and depicting a literal city of gold ripe for the taking, the game tasks you with creating a metaphorical city of gold where you and your people can thrive.
The best part is that this reverence did not dull the enjoyment of the game’s aesthetic and themes. Many well-meaning developers often fall into this pitfall, especially with simulator games, but El Dorado successfully circumvented it through genuineness and creativity.
Milestone Tech Progression
I’m a fan of how you progress through technologies in this game because it forgoes the usual tech tree and instead utilizes a milestone system like that in Satisfactory. You unlock new buildings and resources by finishing a mission, often with little handholding in between. In-game, this is done by unlocking constellations and leveling up your city through the fulfillment of basic necessities.
The sudden influx of new things to do and a much higher milestone gives you room to be creative without being too laissez-faire about it. It’s not unique by any means, but it’s a refreshing sight in a genre flooded by tech trees.
Cons of El Dorado: The Golden City Builder
| Things That El Dorado: The Golden City Builder Can Improve |
|---|
|
Janky Camera Controls Surprisingly High System Requirements Needs More Quality of Life Features |
Janky Camera Controls
It's difficult to overlook this game's awkward camera controls, particularly when combined with its frustratingly opaque treeline. While the basic controls are somewhat acceptable, though a bit unusual, the real issue lies with the constant and uncontrollable edge-scrolling. This makes navigating menus and side tabs a nightmare, especially since there's no option to recenter your view of the city when you inevitably end up in a random spot in the forest.
Surprisingly High System Requirements
Despite its classic city builder aesthetic and average-quality assets, this game demands significant graphical power to render its detailed topography and simulations. Even with a mid-tier setup like mine, running the game on the highest settings caused occasional stuttering.
Needs More Quality of Life Features
This game is an absolute chore to play, primarily due to its lack of logistical overview and generally low fun factor. Beyond the earlier mentioned edge-scrolling issue, the sheer number of clicks and menus required to delete roads is nearly unbearable. The inability to make trees transparent when they obstruct the camera view makes building roads among the opaque treeline frustratingly tedious. Simply put, it often feels more like a chore than a game, and that's worth putting out there.
Is El Dorado: The Golden City Builder Worth It?
Worth A Tarnished Goldpiece, Maybe
While I wouldn't call El Dorado the bargain of a lifetime, it's not really asking for much with its measly $16 price tag and a lot of its shortcomings can be fixed in the future. It's usually good practice to release a good game from the outset, but even good ideas can miss sometimes. I believe there's a good game somewhere under all this rubble. For now, though, El Dorado is worth only a tarnished gold piece, awaiting the shine it could achieve.
| Platform | Price |
|---|---|
| Steam |
$20-25 |
El Dorado: The Golden City Builder FAQ
What Era is El Dorado: The Golden City Builder Set In?
According to the game’s developers, this game is set in the Classical Era—over 600 years before the conquistadors first set foot in that continent.
What are Cenotes in El Dorado: The Golden City Builder?
Cenotes are naturally occurring freshwater reservoirs that the ancient Maya originally settled next to, believing that they were portals to the realm of the gods. In El Dorado: The Golden City Builder, they serve as a means for cities to gain freshwater resources via the Water Collector building.
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El Dorado: The Golden City Builder Product Information
 |
|
| Title | EL DORADO: THE GOLDEN CITY BUILDER |
|---|---|
| Release Date | June 17, 2024 |
| Developer | Hobo Bunch, Gameparic |
| Publisher | Gameparic, Games Incubator, PlayWay S.A. |
| Supported Platforms | PC (Steam) |
| Genre | Strategy, Simulation |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | RP |
| Official Website | El Dorado: The Golden City Builder Website |
