Sweet Transit - An Early Access Review
Platform: PC
Developer: Ernestas Norvaišas
Publisher: Team17
Release Date: Early Access as of July 28, 2022
Sweet Transit, a new rail simulator/citybuilder currently in early access, is a deceptively frustrating game.
From the start, it presents itself as something of a pleasant, relaxing, folksy builder game. There’s a bluesy americana soundtrack by Ely Robbins, a Western-style aesthetic with its laborers and “beginning of the rail era” atmosphere, and the idea of building trains to connect cities and unlock further buildings and advancements is kind of a cool one. You’re set loose on a gorgeous map to build your first centers of industry, and from there, to slowly conquer the New World by connecting it up with trains.
It’s at the point somewhere around building your first train that you find yourself somewhat in error, and this was the point that I began to have flashbacks to when I used to try programming in Python. Sweet Transit is, you see, a systems-based game, in the sense that you have to work out logistics, gates, and kind of puzzle out where the bugs are in your transit system. Some of this is covered by the tutorials. Some of it remains obtuse, always just tantalizingly out of reach. It’s a game with a rather steep learning curve, and one that remains sweetly deceptive even as you bash your head against yet another logistics problem for the fourth time. It’s satisfying, brain-melting, and somehow intriguing in one bizarre package.
Sweet Transit begins with you procedurally generating a map. From there, you place your first warehouse, first village center, and your first industries before finally connecting it all up with railways. As you fulfill more objectives, you slowly open up more options— successfully building a coal plant means you get access to your first train, because you now have a source of fuel, bringing enough people to your village means you open up a market— and connecting the world through a network of rails and signal gates. As nothing moves without a rail network, it places the emphasis on building trains, routes, learning how to set up if/then statements to get your trains to move along those routes, and building signals to control the flow of rail traffic.
So right off the bat, the game is gorgeous. The areas are lush, the colors are vibrant, and even the deserts look like they’re alive. The trains are usually brightly colored in a way that makes the player feel nostalgic for old-style locomotive engines. Between the graphical style and instrumentals, it evokes feelings of the older Sid Meier series Railroad Tycoon, which ran on a similar premise of connecting supply centers with trains in a huge logistical network. With the bluesy Americana of the soundtrack, it makes everything feel of a piece. It’s an excellent presentation.
It’s also satisfying to watch things work, to slowly build up your villages and watch them bustle around as you slowly build the town, then the first industry (usually a fishing dock) and then move on to mines and your first train line. Buildings are grouped by use, you can simply click on any part of the environment, and it’ll bring up a menu about the thing you clicked, with the list of building options and extensions right there. It’s very easy in those first few moments to get a jump-start on building. Then you fall off the difficulty cliff, and the game decides to show you what it’s really like.
Building railroads is…complex. It’s also very easy to get stuck with something that doesn’t work, requiring you to plot things out in advance. While the game does come with an extensive tutorial that shows you how to build and chain together signal blocks, set up the basic if/then statements for your train routes, and connect your first villages, it is also very obtuse. This is not a game for those who are just getting into strategy of this type, it’s essentially a ‘90s sim builder game given modern graphics and a mildly easier to understand interface. Even with the tutorials, it’s got a steeper learning curve, requiring you to really know what you’re doing before you lay those first tracks. But the good news is, after the first few tries, suddenly it starts to hum along, and you’re juggling routes, finding more efficient ways to lay rail, and it all starts to come together.
But to get to that point, there’s a lot of trial and error. While the tutorials do give some guidance, and there are help messages, they seem a little obtuse at times. It took me three tries to get my first functioning railroad, with at least one complete restart. When I finally did get things running, it took me a while to experiment with signals until the trains I had would actually move on the tracks, and in one case, a train I sent to load up supplies would just…pass the station completely rather than loading, for reasons still unclear even with the (somewhat overzealous) message system pointing out any errors in logistics. This is after going through the tutorials. Similarly, a bug in the logistics can stall everything, frustrating the player and requiring them to check exactly what happened.
Furthermore, if you botch a building placement, there’s no real way to move it or correct that mistake once it’s down without deleting everything attached to it and moving it to the correct place. This can get annoying, especially with train routes, since then the trains now have specific instructions they cannot carry out and things will have to be re-added to the route. Further frustrating the placement issues are some bizarre pathing errors when laying train tracks, where trying to construct a simple curve will result in esoteric, looping patterns unless you use the “precise movement” option to build tracks incrementally. It’s kind of an unforgiving system, even as it does so many things right.
All of this could actually be fixed with a more integrated tutorial. The tutorial section is very well done and informative, though as it’s not actually connected to starting up a game, it becomes an exercise where one can get very good at learning the tutorials, but a little fuzzier on applying that knowledge. If there was some way to take you through the early steps of the game, it would do a lot for newer players, allowing them to get a grip on systems in a more practical and applied way. It’s a game with some great ideas and some interesting systems that actually has a kind of coding aspect to it, setting up if/then statements and building with more complexity from there.
But for right now, if you’re a hardcore simulation fan, then this will be a definite delight, a pleasing and cozy-looking game with a lot of interlocking systems that require prior planning and full knowledge of how things work to get everything moving just right. It’s the perfect game for those who know what they’re doing.
It could, however, use a little more polish if you’re still new to the genre.
The Good:
- Easy and intuitive interface
- Lush, pleasant visual style
- Deep and complex logistical mechanics
- Excellent map variety
- A relaxing game with just enough challenge for hardcore building sim fans
The Bad:
- Huge difficulty curve for newcomers
- Frustrating pathing for a game entirely about building transit paths
- Making a wrong move can sometimes erase tons of work.
- Tutorials separate from the main game cause difficulty applying the knowledge to in-game scenarios
In its current early access state, it’s a delight for hardcore sim fans and a nightmare to those just getting into things.