Derail Valley

После 1,5к часов на пиратке и тут с 5 часами скажу она ахуеная

Derail Valley is a little bit different approach into the world of train simulators. It's a combination of quite nice level of realism and learning curve but also humor, fun and sometimes chaotic moments. At least for me the first 100 hours gave plenty of ooooh sheeeeep moments whenever I felt too over confident or simply remembered some curves and speed limits wrong, but those moment's teach valuable lessons. Of course you are also free to play like "it's fine, just don't look at it!" and have funny moments derailing spicy cargo down the mountain side. Once you learn the game mechanics and game world and how to read and use the rail yard maps etc, it's somewhat easy to get going in the career and start making plenty enough of money. I've restarted from zero few times and it's not that much of grinding to get all licences to be able to drive every locomotive and every type of jobs. Insurance helps when mistakes happen and so there is game mechanics to help new players and you can always tweak the settings too to find enjoyable balance. Personally I feel like this game never really ends, even when you have everything already, it's just a point where you can enjoy picking up whatever low payment jobs you like and drive for fun without worries about money grinding or anything, like enjoying the little S060 steam shunter on long haul routes while you could drive that same job 3x faster with something else. Just play the game as you enjoy it the best. One interesting feature in the game is the rail museum in Derail Valley. You find and recover old locomotives along the game world, you tow them to the museum and restore them back to life with new parts (that you also have to buy and transport to the museum). You will have permanent access/ownership to these museum locomotives and you are free to drive the jobs with them, you can also customize them stuff like extra gauges and lights etc. It's also done in interesting way, you'll be using drills, soldering iron, wiring and all kinds of parts to literally do the work yourself instead of just choosing what you want and click a button to make it happen. And oh dear when you run out of soldering wire just when you're one solder joint away from completing your vision. Now the ability to move around in the game world with warp speeds becomes handy. The thing I love the most in this game, it delivers in my opinion the most realistic take of what it is to operate steam engines & steam locomotives. For sure there is plenty of shortcuts like warming up from cold takes just few seconds (I personally wish there could be an option for bit longer warm up, like taking few minutes to build up the heat and steam, I miss that from the old steamer overhaul mods). But when it comes to the stuff that matters to most players, keeping that steam engine running efficiently yet with enough heat and steam generation for the situation, that is hand down excellent in Derail Valley. It's just feels like you're trying to keep a living fire breathing beast happy in constantly changing demand of power while sometimes battling with the amount of grip, especially in rainy weather. Let the fire cool down and steam generation to slow down in long steep uphills and you will stall. Yet it is also wasteful to keep overly hot fire on the box, you will just spend your water and coal for nothing unless you're really needing ton of steam and max pressure. It's really rewarding when you start to learn how to master it in the challenging routes of Derail Valley, when to push the loco to the max and when to just lazily chugging on and keeping a smaller fire to conserve water consumption. Forget to use the injector or simply forget that there is steep downhill ahead when the boiler is bit low on water level? You might have a pretty explosive lessons what happens when the crown sheet, the roof of the firebox, is exposed as water no more covers it. The amount of overhauling and updating and then yet again overhauling the game mechanics and graphics and optimizing and... This game is absolute labor of love from the developers. Years ago when I bought this game I thought it's kind of what it is and I didn't expect it to evolve much anymore. But how wrong I was, the game has gone through multiple massive evolution cycles and on the horizon is yet more new content and whole new map too. This game is alive and going strong. And for last, there is cats. There is stray cat's wandering around the towns and rail yards. Seeing a cute pixel cat might just be the emotional support you need when you've done 10 mistakes in the last 2 hours and things are snowballing into "never stop the madness" level mayhem. There is also sandbox mode when you want things to go south and have fun experimenting with mass destruction in this rather unique take on train driving games/simulators. With lot of new content on the horizon I would recommend trying it especially if it's on sale.