Sweet Transit

The game definitely doesn't explain several mechanics very well, and there will be frustrations with unclear progression requirements. That said, the game is not too complicated to figure out with a little time and focus if it looks like something you'd enjoy, and you'll be rewarded with a satisfying, resource-driven town building experience with industrial mechanics that seem appropriately complex. The artwork is charming, and I personally love the designs of the locomotives, of which there are several more than I thought there would be. I'm enjoying my time with the game, and I think it's worth the price, especially if it's on sale.

This game has so many problems it's honestly impossible to recommend. The biggest is the absolute lack of urgency or progression. You start out in basically a perfect state, your people are happy, you make a lot of money, and resources are so plentiful there's nothing driving you forward to expand, get more resources and grow your city. The game has several UI problems, buildings only show contextually, which is awful to start with. The tutorial might as well not be there, it's pointless. Visually, it's stunning, the trains look cool, the actual building is really neat as well! But everything else here is just not good. I hate having to spam water towers to supply my city, the train system is nowhere near as robust as it should be, the UI needs a lot of work, it's just a shame. This could be great but it just doesn't feel finished.

I wanted to give my review to help bring this game up from its mixed rating as I do think it is a very entertaining game for train enthusiast. As someone that has played Transport Fever 2 and Railway Empire, I appreciate this game for having maybe the easiest rail building, as well as realisitic train system out of those prior two mentioned. The trains don't magically just 'flip' (unless you intentionally build a reverse drive train to go in reverse at an end of a line). I'm not sure when the tutorial was added in regard to a lot of the other reviews, but I found doing all the tutorials to be more than enough info on how to setup an initial functioning rail line with multiple stops and even how to effectively use some of the different rail signals and their purposes. You can even go a bit further with the scenarios they have that have small challenges to let you really see the difference in effectiveness of rail and signal placements which I found helpful before diving into a freeplay game (which there only is for those that may prefer a more 'campaign' driven gameplay). One thing I am surprised I don't see mentioned in reviews is that the gameplay is a lot more Anno than I initially expected. If you are familiar with the progession in Anno and enjoy those games, I would highly recommend trying this as you advance to the next citizen tier level with the new goods and services you need to provide for them, sans ships. Its trains all the way down.

I want to recommend this game but based on multiple factors, I cannot. First, the learning curve is steep. Even now after 167 hours, I can't explain exactly how certain mechanics function and I often run into issues stemming from that. Even the in-game wiki is missing information I'd deem vital. Not only that, this is one of those rare games that it's hard to find information for even online, if at all. Second, it still suffers from bugs and having been seemingly abandoned, those bugs may never be fixed. These are not small bugs, they're ones like a single signal being deleted crashing the entire save. This can be remedied if you have a save from before you placed it but you lose a significant amount of progress almost every time, if not your entire save. If I wasn't actively trying to 100% the achievements, I'd have given up a long time ago. I'm not sure I'm even comfortable recommending this on a steep sale. Recommend you get your logistics fix elsewhere.

Very fun and solid gameplay loop. Wish the dev didn't abandon it, as I'm sure some more expansions/updates would've been a welcome addition. That being said the modding community has definitely taken this game under its wing. A really great workshop expansion is the Artisans mod, lots of content in there! :)

Sweet Transit is a very train-focused game with some city-building attached. The learning curve is very steep, with a lot of information that's difficult to find, or just outright not explained in the game at all. Some things you can determine online, but some things you can't. Most players will hit barriers and give up after about 8-10 hours. Just look at how most players abandon it early, even those with positive reviews. Some people who are really into trains get past the economics of the game, but it's still pretty frustrating. The user interface hides things. A number of industries and storage buildings are hidden unless you've selected a village. There are small and medium storage buildings for villages, and small and medium storage buildings for your primary warehouse, and the two kinds of storage buildings do different things even though they are called the same thing. You can't even see the warehouse storage buildings unless you've selected the warehouse first. The train aspects of the game are generally pretty good. It has robust signaling, including trains that reserve signal blocks many steps ahead, based on how fast the train is moving. Trains always look far enough ahead so they can come to a complete stop, which is much more sophisticated than a lot of train games. The game includes chain signals, which avoids many deadlock issues, though deadlock can still happen with enough congestion. Trains have elaborate calculations, so every locomotive has power and weight, including braking power depending on both locomotives and cargo cars which provide their independent braking. Which sounds pretty great, but in practice this doesn't matter much. You end up with the current-best freight and passenger trains, with no real differences. There are some odd locomotives like trolleys which have no real value because they're slow. The city building is clearly patterned after the Anno series, and that's not a good thing. It has a weird inverted economy where almost all of your income comes from taxing workers, and none of it comes from the various industries you build, except indirectly by providing jobs for workers. Farms, mines, food processing, industry etc. costs you money and generates no income. Effectively you're giving away everything for free and paying for the privilege of doing so. The economy is seriously bad when it comes to the 3rd tier of workers, known as "tradesmen." There aren't a lot of possible jobs, and not much consumption of the products the tradesmen can produce. Either you end up with tradesmen with no jobs, which hurts growth and taxation, or you produce a lot of cigars and coffee that do nothing but eat money for no benefit other than giving tradesmen jobs. I ended up quitting because of a serious bug. Trains just stopped transporting workers to one of my factories. For a long time it worked, and then it just... stopped. There were plenty of unemployed workers available in my city, and several trains with empty spaces for workers, but the trains just wouldn't transport workers and the factory stopped working for lack of workers.

Theres a lot of QoL and UX and balancing issues, I really didn't expect it to be this bad from someone related to factorio.

This game is fine, but the pressure to expand wasn't strong enough to keep me motivated. If the expansion is simply at your own pace, then why ever do it? The economy also poses no real risk of failure; you start with so much money you'll likely never feel the need to optimize or expand to generate more. I like the aesthetics. It makes sense this game looks good as it was created by Ernestas Norvaišas, who was a 3d artist for Wube working on Factorio. Unfortunately it seems the aesthetic was the primary force in development. The industry chains are shallow, the mechanics are obtuse and nebulous, and the actually gameplay is boring. It's really unfortunate. I really wanted to like this game. I have four primary issues with this game. First, the controls are horrendous. Everything you can build sits on a single horizontal slider at the bottom of the screen. It can be filtered and searched through, but the act of using it feels like wading through mud. It's pretty, but unless you like the novelty of horizontal scrolling, the process is incredibly slow. Most menus are like this - very pretty, but chores to use. Additionally, the in-world controls are really bad too. When placing rails the automated path system takes over, and it's not great. You can't choose what direction the last rail is facing, so the path system may find a viable route, but unless it happens to want the track to face the same way you do, it's completely moot. Additionally you can't place curved sections as the last track piece, so if you want to make an interchange that's a bit more complex or particular, you'll be placing and deleting a lot of track pieces just to get the alignment you want. My second issue is the tutorial. You are guided around the screen in a frenzy, but it doesn't really cover the basic 'why' behind what you are doing. As someone who works in education, this is something that I have grown to really despise. If your tutorial says, 'okay click this here and then click this there' and then pats you on the back when you do it but doesn't explain *why* you are doing it, you haven't been taught how to build a settlement or train line, you have been taught how to build *that* settlement or train line, which, in a sandbox logistics game isn't very useful since every world will be different. The tutorial needs to explain why we are clicking the boxes we are clicking, and currently it does not. After giving up on the in-game tutorials I watched a few Youtube videos which gave me enough to get started. Third, the scheduling system in the game is abysmal, and makes multi-purpose trains (ya know, the best way to move materials long distances) extremely difficult to make, and even when you have made them, they totally suck. Each train can only do one action at a station at a time, meaning the train you have sitting at the potato farm can't have passengers getting on and off the train and also potatoes being loaded onto the train at the same time. First the passengers get on and off, and then the potatoes get loaded. This leads to congestion on your network and annoyances that encourage each train to be dedicated to a specific material, which is both boring and annoying considering you must make bespoke trains. You have the tools to construct the exact train you want to build, but not the tools necessary to schedule it. Finally, this game is exceedingly shallow. This feels like a very pretty tech demo. The industry chain is simple, short, and very linear. The locomotive options are varied but completely purposeless, and most of the challenges amount to 'place more of this thing wherever, who gives a ♥♥♥♥.' Seriously, why are water towers even in the game? This game has a lot of promise, but at this stage it's just hot air. There's a very interesting idea for a game here, but it's hiding behind a thick layer of makeup where game mechanics should be. It's very disappointing that this game looks so much better than it actually plays. Ernestas Norvaišas clearly has the art side of game development down, but he should REALLY consider outsourcing menu and game design to people who know what makes a game good. The biggest things I think need to be fixed: - better UI (not prettier, more easily navigable. Increase usability and then make it looks nice) - better placement and control options. Let a track segment end in a curve. Let me control which direction the last track piece in a path is. If I start a track segment running parallel to an already built track, maybe click in place so that the next segment runs parallel, since half of all the track I place is for a bi-directional route anyway. - Scheduling needs to be reworked. Right now every action has a station, but it needs to be the other way around. Every station should have a list of actions that all run simultaneously. - The industry chain needs to be necessary to ongoing success. Citizens should depend on more than just food. That way, there's actual loss if something breaks down. If I don't have wood track pieces should start to cause derailments. If cities don't have stone buildings should start to crumble. If towns don't have food citizens should die. There are no consequences to failure and that makes progression boring. If I can't fail, then what is success? - There needs to be much more network depth. Industries should rely on each-other more heavily. Something like a stone quarry should require coal to run. - get rid of the water towers. They do nothing. It's genuinely such a stupid hurdle to jump through it actually makes me mad how dumb it is that I need to place them around for no reason other than 'cause water,' when I don't need to maintain them.

I’d honestly give Sweet Transit a “mixed” rating if that were an option, but since it’s not, I’m more inclined to give it a negative review. The first major issue is the UI, it’s extremely unintuitive. The developers seem reluctant to trust players to choose what they need, so buildings appear and disappear from the construction menu depending on what you’ve selected or what you’re currently doing, even when not using the auto tab. This makes the whole experience unnecessarily confusing and frustrating. [strike]For a long time, I struggled to understand even the basic train-related mechanics. For example, it feels like the main train station only handles passengers, while a smaller station, unlocked very quickly, handles cargo. The problem is that both stations have identical descriptions, stating they can handle both passengers and goods, which only adds to the confusion.[/strike] (figured it out) Route creation between stations also feels very limited. This might partly be on me, since my baseline for train systems is Factorio, but I still feel like there are too few options. On top of that, it seems you can’t transport mixed cargo, for example, with a train of 6 bulk wagons you can’t set a route where it fills 3 wagons with stone and 3 wagons with sand, it will only load one type or the other, which is a big limitation. There are also noticeable quality of life issues. The desirability system feels very esoteric, while there is a tab that shows where and how strong the negative desirability is in a given area, the system itself doesn’t [strike]explain which buildings generate desirability or undesirability, by how much[/strike], (found it) or within what range. [strike]There’s also a lack of a proper information menu, more specifically a single tab that contains aggregated data, ideally presented in graph form, showing what is being produced, where, and in what quantities, as well as what’s being consumed.[/strike] (found it) It’s entirely possible that I’m just retarded and that all of these complaints come down to my own misunderstanding, the tutorial certainly doesn’t help much. It consists of several small scenarios that teach you a single topic, and the only one that is good is the signals tutorial.