Distributrains

I was supposed to just quickly test it but instead got stuck and ruined my sleep schedule playing it for too long.

This was a nice surpise! Beautiful looking goal focused TTD inspired ...roguelike?? Theres a basic game mod where you can pause freely and think about your set up ( which I super need ) and a challange mode with when you feel more confidant.

A game that doesn't aim to compete with OpenTTD, but coexist with it as an alternative for people that want something more action packed I like it. Maybe not on all days, but some days. (Marked as product recieved for free since I was a tester)

This is fun. It's a little like a challenge generator for OpenTTD (there are many comparisons, it's almost unavoidable, so I won't avoid them), but with mechanics more precisely tuned towards that goal rather than having to cram it into an already existing structure. Mostly I play on the mode with no time pressure, but the mode where you can't build while paused, and the time keeps ticking on, and you need to get everything done quick as well as right - well, that seems like a lot of fun if you have a block of time to concentrate on it as well. The graphics are 3d, low poly but charmingly textured, I think they work really well for it and carve out enough of its own style to be easy to read in a hurry (important, see above) but also have its own identity. The animations are few but well done and pretty smooth, and the general UI is fine, and getting better with most updates. Again, if you've played OpenTTD you'll probably just know what most of the buttons and options do, but the way you interact with them is quite different. Card draw and a roguelike feeling layer of rotating possible quest-mission-things keeps things a lot more interesting, and the map is small and focussed. You usually start out pushing everything to and from a big central structure, and later expand into more efficient expanded operations - but in comparison to more traditional train empire games (almost all of them, not just OpenTTD this time!) there's a lot of *reasons* for you to put multiple cargos on each train. Industries are massively boosted by consuming various things, usually not even that much of the thing, so it's usually worth your while to take a tiny car of fuel or a half-load of metal along with you in one direction before most of your train picks up whatever the farm/factory is producing. Then you can either ship those out for points, or move them elsewhere for further processing. Do this while also managing your town growth (it needs resources to grow, but also different resources to sustain, and produces more waste the bigger it gets) means there's always quite a lot to do, and on challenge mode at least feels very busy. It's not cozy, sit back and wait for resources to roll in, it's very much get something that mostly works done as soon as possible, make sure you're not going to run out of anything, and build from there. It's pleasingly different to most train games, but also pleasingly similar in many ways that matter. It's not expensive, it hasn't crashed or bugged on me once so far (admittedly, not played it THAT much, but it's a great sign). If you like anything of what you see, you should give it a go!

Very quality game with an immense attention to detail that does something new while wearing its influence(s) with pride

simple but good

Really digging this game; it's already sapped away several evenings of my week. Most train games are obviously inspired by Transport Tycoon and are basically the same game with slightly different coats of paint, but this one is actually trying to do something interesting and different within the genre. The roots of Transport Tycoon are clearly there, but there's so many little twists that it's unfair to compare it directly. I think this developer is doing something very innovative in this genre and breaking the mold of what we've all come to expect. The mechanics of the game will be very familiar to anyone who has put several hours into a Transport Tycoon-like: signals, orders, bring-resource-to-factory-get-new-resource-in-return. But I think the most interesting part of the game is the introduction of the "train core", a magical roundhouse that acts as both a train depot and a massive storage warehouse. There are NO OTHER depots in this game*, so you need to think really carefully about where you place your train core and how you will be utilizing it as it is the only place where you can buy trains and dump resources mid-transit. This makes the approach to the early game more like a puzzle, where your initial decisions on where to break ground in relation to the landscape matter so much more than other train games. The game also imposes strict rules about proximity of industries and stations. Unlike other train games where you can cluster a bunch of industries and stations off in one part of the map somewhere to maximize efficiency, this one really forces you to think not just about the industry you're placing in this cycle, but how it will affect your ability to place other industries you may want to use in future cycles. A really convenient spot for your glass factory could happens to overlap with an ore vein, and placing your factory there would functionally lose you the ore vein for the entire rest of the game. My last game just had several geothermal geysers right in the middle of prime farmland when I was going for a food victory, so I had to seriously consider power management to avoid losing more farmland. It's just cool! Lots of decisions to consider in Distributrains that most other train games completely ignore. The developer also seems to be very active. I watched Master Hellish play through the tutorial, and he had some quality of life critiques with the game. By the time I bought it, maybe 1-2 weeks after the video had come out, all of those QOL critiques were already addressed. Every time I boot the game up, there are more little QOL things and bugfixes that the dev has added. I honestly don't have any major critiques about the game. --- *Technically there are train turntables that can be placed elsewhere on the map, but these are really just to help facilitate some temporary shunting operations. They cannot be used to buy new trains or store resources.

If you like Transport Tycoon or other infrastructure building games but feel like most of them are too aimless and just take too much of your time, this is the game for you. Fast paced and fun, with goal-oriented, roguelike-esque mechanics and many different ways to play.

I'm not here to mince words. This is a phenominally daunting game. And for some, that's absolutely a positive. My curator (link in my profile) was given several copies to review, as this game was meant to be played coop. I'm not going to lie though, I had a lot of trouble getting anybody else to step up. It's not a game that looks friendly and it daunted most everybody else I know. This is very not for everyone, but it very much IS for some folk. Might that be you? In short, it's an infrastructure game. Satisfy the needs of consumer by encouraging industry. It's a little, [i]a little[/i] like Train Valley 2 (TV2) (listen, before this it was the only tycoon-adjacent game I'd played, don't judge me harshly), but only in the same way that an actual luxury sedan is at all like a child's toy. Put down railroads, schedule trains, establish factories, build up a town and manage power load, waste removal and supply construction material. Keep the citizens happy or you get ejected, so there's a lot of juggling going on. This is further complicated by the fact that you're never meant to pause and must react to things in realtime, deciding (quickly!) if it's worth the effort to respond to it or not when there might be more pressing demands on your time. (There's an optional pause mode, useful for a solo player.) One of the chief difficulties for me lies in that the graphics are really sparse, and the UI is tiny and rather unintuitive. Now, that's mitigated by a rather elaborate tutorial that steps you through everything, by having you click through buttons and blinking them to show you what button it means. That tutorial will require you to read a fair bit of text, mind you, and that's clearly not a problem for you if you're down here, but there's a lot of people who were never given over to reading, I tell you what. We're talking several paragraphs of text over each of nine tutorials, there's readin' to do! UI is kind of a big deal in this sort of game. Where's the buttons, what do they do, and so forth? The icons need to be meaningful, their utility should be clear, especially when you need to make decisions with time pressure. And, I'll say that some of the buttons are clearer than others, but there weren't a lot of head-scratchers. Some number of things (buying a train and cars for it) are buried a few layers deep though. It'll come with familiarity, and there's tooltips that pop up promptly, so it seems viable. Over some time, I expect I'd gain familiarity with it and the game isn't trying to hinder me. But do also bear in mind that I've also come at this with only TV2 experience; transport tycoon games were never a thing I touched until this year. Imagine! I've been gaming since the late 1970s and I never once tycooned a transport until a few months ago. Ugh, this admission also doesn't do wonders for my seeming youthfulness, does it? The game is coop-playable. Now, as that's a focus of my curator, I really regret I couldn't get anybody else to bite on this. But it does look like the developer is hosting a central server, and the goal would to divide and conquer all the myriad tasks that need to be done, reducing cognitive load on a given player. That is rather attractive, not gonna lie. If you're at all like me, you've seen several other reviews mention "OpenTTD" and were left unsatisfied. That's the actual name, where TTD (without the "open") stands for "Transport Tycoon Deluxe". It was kind of a big deal in the 1990s, I recall. So to wrap it up, if you're satisfied with simpler visuals, but you want to get really into the weeds of a transport game (and you thought TV2 was awfully basic) then you might just consider this. It's not tidy, curated puzzles, it's way more organic. If that calls to you, well, here you go. I expect it's a genre that doesn't have a lot of titles willing to go this deep into it. ----- Just one last thing, between you and me. The music in the store's video doesn't fully reflect the music the game has. Many of the songs in-game are way, way better. On the whole, it gives me a mid-90s' .MOD vibe; made by inspired individuals with little musical training, it's kind of strange. But hey, let's be honest, if you're gonna get this, it never was for tunes anyway, amirite? And you can always turn that off.