This game sets itself up like a train-themed puzzler. Make some tracks, control the switches to make trains take one rail or the other, get them to their destination safely. Use the money you earn to expand your train network. I like it, even though I'm not a train guy. (* If you came in from Train Valley 2, see some notes at the end.)
But folks, what this game actually is is Dark Souls, Train Edition. If you have ADD, that is. Ah, I am one of those people, as if you couldn't tell by reading the weird rambles of reviews I write. This isn't a [i]hard[/i] game per se (much like I think Dark Souls is not a hard game, per se) it's just if your attention wanders at an inopportune moment, trains smack into each other and a massive chain explosion sets off.
My trains explode a lot.
Now, this isn't the end of a run, necessarily. Nobody rides these trains since they're apparently all made of frozen nitroglycerine, so nobody gets hurt when the inevitable explosions happen. The game makes that clear in the first 20 seconds. Buuuuut there's a reward for a perfect run. It's a game that rewards XP per level only the first time you've attained a goal, so if you're trying for perfect runs, you're gonna do it again anyway, may as well restart if your layout was decent.
So I restart a lot.
In a given round, trains set out from stations on a regular basis. You can send them out early, and you can even request extras. If you're looking for perfect scores, sometimes the game does things like, "Send all trains out early," or, "Request a bunch of extra trains," or "Don't stop your trains."
So it's one thing to keep an eye on one train. I'm really good at that. It's another when there's four trains in the complete spaghetti-tangle of tracks you laid down, and one switch set wrong means the train is veering off elsewhere, or... oh look, explosion. Again.
I think I suck at the game. And if there were a few minor changes to it, I wouldn't even mind! I'd be cheerful about it all. I'm certainly not angry about it, more... composed, really. I have accepted it is my dharma to unwittingly cause miniature trains to explode. All the same, a few things hamper my enjoyment enough that I need to write them down. Suppose I should have way up there, oh well. You're not the engineer of my train of thought, I tell you what.
So there's a few bugs. The serious ones show up after extended playing; trains launching unannounced, sometimes switches stop working. Relaunching the game sorts that out. Wish I could relaunch my brain sometimes. Sometimes the rail-laying algorithm has a stroke and grinds the game to a halt for a second, when you're trying something complicated like a curve just before a tunnel.
And, most of all, the UI is enormously unresponsive. It helpfully points out where you can build from, you must select one of those points alone, then drag to draw rails and release when satisfied. It doesn't always react, it doesn't always make it adequately clear when you request something impossible.
I'd really, really love a blueprint where I could lay down a bunch of rails with intersections, and then commit the whole thing. I don't always have a sense as to whether those rails will merge or cross, and undoing laid rail is lossy in terms of cash. You want to avoid that.
The last issue, though it's a me thing, is that there's no in-game save facility. You do the whole run in one go. Runs are under ten minutes for a gold time medal, excluding all the frequent pausing you... I do. I do. To try and keep these trains from exploding each other. If an untimely explosion ends your perfect run, there's no rolling back, just starting over. Which means you... sorry, which means I wind up laying down my ideal rail starting layout. Over. And over.
If I was less dead-set on getting perfect runs this would hardly be an issue, so to a degree, this is a hell of my own devising. But, my friends, if I had a save feature, I'd've been done with this game already, perfect across all 40 missions, instead of... I think I'm on 17 or 18 right now? I shudder to think what nightmares of rail await me.
Don't cry for me. I chose this life.
Anyway! If trains are your jam, there's surely even more for you to like here. The train models are all cute-and-stumpy, like train-chibi. They may be modelled after real life trains, with text boxes explaining their origins and capabilities and such. XP (and those perfect runs) unlock more trains. I'm not even beating myself up for anything I can fully appreciate!
So, ah, this was a journey. A train journey. On a train made of frozen nitroglycerine. I hope you enjoyed your journey, we're approaching the concluding paragraph, where I try to convince you to watch my streams and check my profile, since my stream and curator are listed there.
But then I also write how I'm too punk to actually provide an URL since I hate advertising, so, you know, I think my own career is undermining myself. But at least I'm having a good time, and this game is part of it. Hopefully see you some stream soon, eh?\
* For those of you from TV 2, this is not TV 2. This is basically TV 1 with a smoother gameplay experience and a slightly different camera angle in exchange for some bugs.
