[quote][b]Warning: GeoBlocking[/b]
This game has been geoblocked by the developer in some regions. This hostile and unethical behavior is often designed to punish gamers in specific regions due to specific political preferences from the developer, and serves only to harm gamers. Because of this behavior, there's no way of telling when the developer will also block your region (if it isn't already). If you buy this game, you're putting your money at risk. Will your region be next?[/quote]
Dark Train is a game that I'd like to like, but can't (and not just because of the developers questionable, unethical use of Steam geoblocking features to restrict the game from some regions). It's an unusual 2D puzzle adventure game where you control a mechanical squid on a train. Quirky, and maybe even interesting, if the game was even remotely accessible.
Developers often think they're very clever by making puzzles too hard to solve unless you refer to online guides/walkthroughs. This results in games that people either don't pick up, or just stick to a walkthrough all the way to get through... and when half the time "playing" a game is spent watching youtube, the developer has failed. That's the case here... while the game seems like it might have charming appeal, the puzzles are simply too obtuse to be fun.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. While this does look a little better than your average 2D game (it's not pixelcrap for starters), there's no prizes for being a fairly tall midget in the era of 3D gaming giants.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
This is indistinguishable from a mobile app, but they put this on Steam instead of the app stores by mistake. Was it rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all.. or maybe they wouldn't let the developer block as many countries as they would have liked)? Either way this probably would have done pretty well on mobile phones. Better than it did on Steam.
Regardless, for all intents and purposes Dark Train might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's extremely difficult to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 130,000+ games on Steam?
Dark Train is also seriously overpriced at $10 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the deliberate unethical geoblocking from the developer, this is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.
