Subway Builder

Ive been looking forward to the steam release for months and months, but it was stupid to release a game so clunky and not at all ready, because it ends up with a shedload of reviews like this. They set themselves up for failiure. The tutorial covers the basic mechanics of building, leaving anything demand/analytics based for the player to figure out on their own. The game is always online, meaning the most basic operations can just stop working for no apparent reason (I suddenly cant build anything because now the game doesnt know my license key). Saving and loading is totally broken, deleting saves doesnt actually seem to do anything as deleting and starting a fresh in the same city, opens the one i just tried to delete. So many problems Ive come across require me to take a breather to avoid punching my screen, or restarting steam altogether. Plus, i still dont know how demand works, it seems to have no relation to the actual city whatsoever, how in Birmingham map, during peak times, everyone wants to go from one industrial estate to another, and no one wants to go into the city centre, the demand seems completely randomised, is impossible to learn, and has meant i am yet to have a single profitable service as the demand system makes no sense. Its a good, pretty game, with lots of potential, but it falls short in so many areas i have to say its been a huge waste of money and im not impressed.

EDIT: This game was vibe coded using Claude AI, buyers beware. The developers need to get their ♥♥♥♥ together. Hope you like getting annoyed and frustrated every time you can't duck your metro line under a road from an elevated position every single time it happens. Maybe if the "Sandbox" mode allowed you to toggle collision on and off I might be more forgiving. Of course I also can't help but call out the price-tag and always online B.S. For a game that's soon to cost $40 USD it's borderline theft, especially for all the technical issues I've seen other players run into. This clearly needed more time in the oven, if the goal was to get it onto steam as soon as possible then perhaps marking this as "Early Access" alongside the website version would make it seem less... scummy. I also don't see why an Offline mode in this single-player game can't be done. If the problem is the "live data" then I'd rather just play with sightly outdated data instead. Either way it being always online essentially leaves it at the mercy of the developers of whether or not the game will even be playable anymore in say 10 years or so, that's what most people are concern with. I had so much hope for this game and perhaps the more time I spend with it some of the more irritating stuff will eventually be ironed out or dissipate. But of course it will never take away from the initial disappointment. I'd refund it if I could but I already played it for over two hours.

The price is completely unrealistic. It’s a game that’s essentially a Google Chrome extension and made with AI.

[h2][b]TLDR: Subway Builder is an excellent concept, however one that is poorly executed, especially for the high asking price. I'd ultimately recommend watching and waiting on this one's future development.[/b][/h2] Subway Builder is a rail network building simulation game, heavily themed around subways although allowing for heavy/commuter rail. The game uses real world city maps and census data to build a more realistic simulation of service demand. It very much follows in the vein of similar games, such as NIMBYRails here on Steam, as well as MetroDreamin' and Brand New Subway, both of which can only be found online. Subway Builder's core USP, however, is its relative simple design and easy to use functionality, especially when compared to NIMBYRails and its fairly steep learning curve. I want to praise a few things about Subway Builder that are absolutely stellar: its visual design, the smoothness of its track building tools, and its ease of adding new vehicles on services. The game looks utterly phenomenal, with users being able to switch between multiple different map design styles on the fly, all of which look stunning. Players can also build tracks and stations with a tool that feels great to use and enables for quick and easy track laying. Adding vehicles onto existing routes is also far easier than in games like NIMBYRails. All of these features make it far easier and more tempting to just pick up and play. Unfortunately, however, despite the hype I had going into this game after waiting months for it to release onto Steam, this is where the praise ends for now. While the track building tools feel smooth and easy to use, in practice, they are anything but. Changing elevation, duplication, crossing roads and rivers, creating junctions with existing tracks, and even connecting with stations are all incredibly frustrating experiences, marred by bugs, poor design choices, and just overall 'jankiness'. One issue I had was with building level/at-grade crossings. For some reason, this is not possible at all with anything other than commuter rail, meaning that despite this being rather common in reality with metro (especially light rail) lines, this is impossible in the game without modding. Another issue I ran into was that trying to go from quad track and splitting it off into separate duplicated track routes was an absolute nightmare. For some reason, the track building tool thinks the best way to go from 4 to 2 tracks is to attach only from the middle 2 tracks, which is something that practically no player would ever want. The imperfect and convoluted solution was to drag off individual single-track lines, which is absurd given that it's (at least from what I could tell) impossible to remerge these single lines into proper duplicated track again. The worst aspect, however, is the route building tool, which barely functions and provides almost no feedback whatsoever to the player about why it doesn't. Sometimes, in my experience, this was 'my fault' for having tiny cracks in track sections because the track building tool decided not to pin and connect properly. Other times, this seemed to occur for no reason other than it being broken, with platforms that are clearly connected not being reachable. [h3]PROS[/h3] [list] [*][b]Gorgeous, sleek visuals[/b] [*][b]An exceptionally smooth track and station building tool, at least at first glance[/b] [*][b]Adding vehicles onto the service patterns of existing routes is incredibly quick and easy to do[/b] [/list] [h3]CONS[/h3] [list] [*][b]Incredibly buggy track-building behind the surface which leads to routes being not buildable[/b] [*][b]Complete lack of usable feedback in the route building tool[/b] [*][b]Baffling design decisions that make building routes nigh impossible, including inabilities to build level crossings on non-commuter rail tracks, difficulty with track elevation and building effective portals, creating junctions and branching of of existing tracks[/b] [*][b]Utterly absurd price point for the overall lack of polish and poor UX[/b] [/list] [h2] CONCLUSIONS [/h2] If this was just a cheap Early Access game, I could maybe look past these issues. But as a A$54 'fully released' game, I absolutely cannot recommend this in such a messy and unpolished state. As a result, I refunded the game, one of <5 games I have ever refunded on Steam from a library of over 2,000, as I was horrified by the sheer lack of polish for the asking price point. I'm hopeful that Subway Builder will continue to be worked on and polished into the game which it promises itself to be and I will continue to watch any future development, hoping that it lives up to the hype. For now, however, I will be staying away from this one and keeping my pineapple (50 bucks, for the non-Aussies).

I don’t usually write reviews, but this game disappointed me so much that I felt I had to. I was really excited about it, but it’s the most incomplete game I’ve ever played. The developer claims it’s fully released, yet it feels like an early-stage beta. Even at this price, it’s a waste of money—and the icing on the cake is that the game requires a constant internet connection. At this point, there’s nothing left for me to do but request a refund.

Unpolished and overpriced. Overall the game is fun but after the first hour it becomes really repetitive. It would have been much better if the developers had released it in Early Access and listened to players’ feedback. Instead they've decided to respond to the criticism with insults which is beneath any acceptable standard.

Vibe Coded Buggy Mess of a game

There isn't a thing that is NOT broken in this game. Crashed 10 minutes into the first launch, performance is terrible, half of the map just does not load, pathfinding is broken, sometimes to literally unplayable state. Keybinds do not work half the time, can not delete saves [on Linux], express stations do not work and this is not even half the problems I faced while playing. I feel like this game is basically in Early Access, but is falsely advertised as Full game. On top of that, it has "always online" DRM, which I don't like and there's no good excuse for it to be this way. Also, forgot to mention, this game is vibecoded in java script [main dev used claude a lot on streams], which rises even more concerns about the quality of this game. I'm NOT happy and I can NOT recommend this game, especially for it's price. UPD: Dev is an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who hates his fans and refuses to acknowledge any criticism. Yikes