Is It Worth Your Time? A First Look At Golem Overlord

I know I'm probably a bit late to the party, but having played Golem Overlord since day one, I felt like it's finally time to take a closer look at the project and discuss, whether it's still worth your time to get involved with it or not.

So what exactly is Golem Overlord? I'm frankly not sure if there's a name for the genre yet, but it's basically one of these glorified defi games where you increase several stats over time by burning the games token that will then provide you with more tokens the next time you claim the tokens. In a way, it's like these little idle games a lot of people play, only that you are competing for crypto currency with other players and well, that there's a lot less clicking involved as most of the time, you simply wait for the timer to finish.

Basically, the game works like this: Every ~8 hours you get to claim your stash of Parts, the games primary token. The size of this stash depends on the amount of Scavenger Golems you have active which is limited by the level of your Charging Station. There's also a cap to how big your stash can grow before you have to claim which is dedicated by your Banked (staked) Parts. As long as you didn't claim your stash, other players can attack you just as you can attack other players. In that case the attackers Power skill is compared with the defenders Fortification skill and then a random roll is made to determine whether the attack was successful or not. If it succeeded, the attacker will steel some of the unclaimed parts, if not, the defender will steal some shards from the attackers stash. How many Parts are stolen depends on the difference in Faith between the two players.

To be quite frank, I've seen setups like this maybe a dozen times by now in different crypto projects. So why would Golem Overlord be any different than any of these other games? The main difference seems to be, that Golem Overlord is developed by yixn, a guy who seems to genuinely care for this project and who keeps investing a lot of time to keep it afloat, adding new features and new ways to spend your shards to the game. This shows in the extremely well done art as much as in the sheer volume of different NFTs that you can acquire in the game.

The art in the game is mostly AI generated, but it has a really great quality and it's a pleasure to look at everything and click around the game. At the same time, the many different consumables and NFTs add a lot of different options and secondary abilities to the game, often boosting or changing one subtle aspect, changing a modifier, or granting you additional information before making decisions.

So overall, the game is really well done. The question is, though, is it really a game in the end? I'm not going to give a final answer on this because different people will have very different opinions on what makes a game and what doesn't. Nevertheless, besides all the options you have, all the NFTs you can claim, in the end it always only comes down to just claiming your stash and using the freshly claimed parts to either upgrade what you have or cash out for other cryptocurrency. So whether Golem Overlord is a game or not, unlike games like Parallel or Splinterlands, I wouldn't play it if it wasn't for the free crypto I was making with it.

So with this settled, the question then remains, how much can you actually earn in the game? As with most of these games, the earlier you got in, the easier it was to build an extraction engine without having to invest anything else. That said, Golem Overlord has been going for quite some time now and unlike most of its competitors in the genre, it has a somewhat stable token going for it.

There's also about $1000 in daily volume over at Hive-Engine, so at least you don't really have to worry about getting rid of your parts if you want to. You do have to reinvest 80% of what you earn in the game in order to still earn full returns and with claims being possible every 8 hours, I'm usually able to sell one claim every two days. Personally I'm making about $0.3 every time I sell these parts, so the earning is roughly $0.15 per day on average. In other words, I'm not really earning much at all from the game.

To be honest, though, I don't mind that too much. I'm playing long enough that the initial investment (which is 28 Hive to get started nowadays) has long been recouped and I never invest anything more into the game, I'm only making profit by now. So to me, Golem Overlord is one of these games that I spent a couple of minutes on per day during my crypto routine in the morning or during a boring call at work, but that I don't interact with much in any other way. Whenever I sell my parts I convert them to something that I expect to appreciate more in the future, like for example Splintershards.

So all things considered, at least in my opinion, there's some merit to playing the game, as long as you don't expect some crazy gameplay or high cash flow. Obviously, you could invest more in the game to increase your part earnings to a higher level but frankly, with the tokenomics the game has, I simply don't see the token ever appreciating in the future as there's always more minted every day, so I'd be cautious with investing any real money into the game. So yes, Golem Overlord can be worth your time, if you are looking for another crypto project that is running somewhat stable, has great art, doesn't require much attention and can provide you with another minor stream of free crypto (once you recouped your initial investment).

And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!