First released on PC in 2018 then ported to Xbox and Playstation in 2021, Treasure Hunter Simulator is now available on Switch from Ultimate Games and Drago. Unfortunately, this simulation suffers from the same issues as many other sim titles by this Polish publisher.
Playing as a treasure seeker, it is your job to location, excavate, and document hidden historical items. Starting small, you are tasked with ransacking local forest regions, but eventually more exotic environments become available after enough treasure has been sold. Dig to find items. Trade in those items for cash. Use that cash to unlock new gear and environments. Repeat.
Credit must be given where it is due, and this simulator has impressively large landscapes to explore and an appreciated simplified control scheme. However, the pop-in is a real problem when pieces of the environment appear within arm’s reach. Everything is also really dark, looking chunky and glossy at ever angle. It doesn’t look so bad in screenshots but suffers from fugliness when playing in motion. The digging animation and tearing up the dirt also looks fake and chunky at best. And as one other lack of polish example, there is an option to invert the camera during gameplay but this invert setting only applies when in the field; walking around your home hub world is non-invert only.
Using the metal detector is also horrifically tedious as its surface area is very small and you must find the baseball sized sweet spot to locator treasure. Along the way, the beeping of the detector is a necessary evil as it grows in speed but finding the exact three-inch area to dig is more challenging than it needs to be. Finding a treasure is like trying to find the hole on a 520-yard Par-5. You will need to sweep inch by inch, which takes time, listening to the insane audio cues, until you eventually find the diggable area on the side of that hill.
By no means is Treasure Hunter Simulator the worst sim on the market but it is a far from the best. I can see how a certain audience might enjoy the mundane tasks, and admiring your Lara Croft-like mansion filled with relics is kind of cool, but I fear the juice won’t be worth the squeeze for most.
SCORE: 5/10
Not As Good As: Gas Station Simulator
Better Than: Tank Mechanic Simulator
Wait For It: a bulk sale on all the Power Wash Simulator DLC
By: Zachary Gasiorowski, Editor in Chief myGamer.com
X/Twitter: @ZackGaz
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