The Oregon Trail Review

The Oregon Trail
Developer: Gameloft
Publisher: Gameloft
Platforms: PC, Switch, IOS
Release Date: November 14, 2022
MSRP: 29.99

It can be hard to talk about The Oregon Trail

The little franchise that could from the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium began in 1971 as little more than text, before being rereleased for the Apple II with an updated graphical interface, becoming a fond and memorable (if frustrating) experience for grade-schoolers and middle-schoolers alike. Discussing the modern update of The Oregon Trail means engaging with that legacy, which is both inevitable and kind of unfair. Gameloft’s 2021 update of The Oregon Trail, ported here to PC from its mobile incarnation on Apple Arcade, is decidedly not the Oregon Trail we know and love. It’s different. But as much as it should be evaluated on its own merits and discussed as its own thing, it’s still difficult to completely separate. Which is a shame, because despite some wrinkles, the new and updated Oregon Trail is a really solid game that improves upon some weaknesses of the series.

There are some who might be unfamiliar with The Oregon Trail, so here goes: You are a settler on a cross-country journey from Independence, Missouri to the promised land of Oregon with a wagon train. You choose your traveling companions, wagon type, any provisions, and then set off across the vast countryside on a mission to reach the Pacific Northwest or die trying. Along the way, you encounter a staggering array of hazards, everything from wagon breakdowns to getting shot because you try to take bullets through the high desert. But with enough luck, skill, and careful planning, you can brave the trip across America and find your place in a new land.

The Oregon Trail is fairly basic gameplay-wise. You choose things from a variety of menus, set your pace and ration consumption, and hit the “travel” button. Along the way, you choose which direction to take from a node map similar to FTL and games of that stripe, leading to a number of encounters on your way between destinations. This also adds a layer of strategy to the game— do you go for the sidequest and possible rewards down the line, or do you make sure your settlers have the bath they sorely need at the campsite and miss out on further encounters? It adds a layer of strategy missing from the basic gameplay of “travel, hunt, rest, random event,” and does actually pull the game into a little more of a narrative than “this guy I named after my friend died of cholera because I didn’t rest long enough.” It improves the gameplay just enough while keeping the classic feel, adding narrative to a game that always had the bones for emergent narrative but perhaps a little less story. Thankfully, that story has been vastly expanded.

That expansion comes in the form of multiple side-stories, each with their own unlocks for the main game. There are boasts between hunters around the campfire, a trilogy of stories about a family reuniting over the course of the trail, a group of gold rushers heading to California, and in one of the nastiest stories ever put in a comparatively lighthearted adventure game, the journey of a group of arms merchants to a fort over an inhospitable desert. Each one has its own set of mechanics, narrative, and characters, using the general framework of The Oregon Trail to tell a wide variety of stories within its compact confines. Sidestepping some of the previous iterations’ more culturally insensitive moments, it also portrays indigenous Americans as fully realized characters in their own right, their stories standing out every bit as much as their counterparts. It’s a way to introduce variety into what’s a very straightforward game, and one that, while not really needing the expansion of its story, benefits from it.

The graphics overhaul also adds something to the game, nicely balancing the retro feel with the overworld map, pixelated art style, and travel nodes, but making the most of PC graphical displays with its expansive vistas and long treks— there are beautiful sunsets, wide open skies, roaring rivers, and some beautiful forests to explore on your trek northwest. It’s a gorgeous game, with characters trudging across the screen as a variety of pixelated wildlife flies to and fro across your field of view, day and night cycling as you stop. The music also adds to this, while there are few tracks, it creates a sense of forward momentum, always ambling towards the next destination, enjoying the scenery on the way. There’s even a wildlife and sightseeing mode for those who’d rather just sit and enjoy things for a while. It’s an excellent use of modern resources to update something older, and it makes the whole work feel of a piece.

But while the updates and expansions to The Oregon Trail are welcome, Gameloft’s update is unable to escape some of the game’s flaws. Once you’ve played the stories to completion, you’re basically done with them. When you play the main game there are a few side quests and random events, but you’ll quickly see them all within your first two plays of the main game mode. It makes things feel wide, but ultimately shallow, like a huge puddle. Once you take enough journeys along the Trail, there’s just not much there to explore, and all the gorgeous scenery along the way can’t hide that. Even the side stories get a little repetitive on repeat plays. The game is wonderful that first or second time through— I personally lost hours to it when I started it up— but the lack of longevity made me wonder if I should keep playing or set it aside after I managed to beat it.

Compounding this, the random events have somehow gotten more random. It made sense that you could get things like cholera and dysentery along the trail. They seemed like sicknesses and ailments that would genuinely happen, along with things like wagon breakdowns, injuries, drowning, and attacks by bandits and wild animals. But explain to me how someone can go from perfectly fine and in full health to suddenly dying because she broke her arm when the wagon rolled over her, followed by dying seconds later from a broken arm I had no chance to treat? I understand bringing ammo into the high desert resulted in one of my settlers being shot, but the randomness of it, the sudden lethality, and the necessity of the ammo (hunting and fishing are the only ways to get a decent amount of food between settlements and without trading) with no way to mitigate things made it seem needlessly cruel. There were times when I’d have a 95% chance of crossing a river, and then lose my entire expedition while the game chided me for not caulking my wagon, a thing I’d actually successfully done. There were other times where suddenly my wagon would just decide to fall apart. It elevated the normal brutality to a vicious streak of nihilistic fatalism, and one that made it difficult to want to continue playing the game.

So in the end, what’s left is…complicated. A marked improvement over past Oregon Trail games? Certainly. It’s gorgeous, addictive to play, has a ton of content (and more on the way) and it’s worth it for those initial vibrant bursts. But once those bursts wear off and the honeymoon period is over, you’re left with a game that while interesting, fun, addictive, and great to look at, is also shallow and needlessly cruel. It’s a game that matches its legacy— fond memories of the good times you have while playing it, but a hesitation to start things up again once you finally make it down the Trail.

The Good:
- Gorgeous graphics and music
- Addictive core gameplay loop
- Interesting and fleshed-out characters
- Unlock system that rewards playing through the different modes and side stories

The Bad:
- Replay value wanes quickly
- Needlessly cruel RNG

Final Score:

A lovely update that unfortunately can’t completely escape the original

Bounty Train Review: Early American Elitism

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Release Date: May 16, 2017
Developer: Corbie Games

Publisher: Daedalic Entertainment
Platforms: PC, Mac
Price: $24.99

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Bounty Train is a curious game. It's a sandbox trading sim/adventure game/railway enthusiast entertainment piece that, while the positions are static and the routes are fixed, still manages to give the player a great deal of movement. It's a genre bending game with multiple story routes and an excellent way to generate micronarratives as you go. It's also one of the few games where you can lose during the tutorial levels, thus causing the game to shrug and go "Well, the game's over, but here, keep playing after the game over screen." But unlike other genre-bending sandbox sims, Bounty Train keeps a focus on fixed points instead of free exploration of the map, allowing the player to focus on things like the complex economy, resource management, and the interplay between various factions and characters, opening up in a way few games of its type do, and creating an entirely unique experience.

Bounty Train's story begins sometime during the Civil War with you and a busted-up locomotive with a cargo compartment. In order to get the majority shares of your father's railroad company and keep the business in the family, you must gather up your siblings, upgrade your train, and slowly expand your rail lines across the United States in an effort to achieve rail dominance and fulfill your father's dream of a transcontinental railroad. Along the way, you will tangle with bandits, get caught up in the Civil War, trade with natives, and engage with numerous dreamers, schemers, con men, and ne'er do wells along the great iron rails. But, lest that sound too sparse, you can also hire a team of hardened gunmen yourself and go after bounties, aid bandits, or smuggle contraband across the United States if you so wish, allowing a remarkable freedom in your quest to fulfill your father's legacy. 

It's actually kind of relaxing at times. Travel is as simple as clicking on the assigned city, figuring how much coal it will take to get there and how much weight you can take with you, then hitting "travel" when you've worked out your route. Along the way, you might run into random events, but most of the time they're very well-defined on the map and you can route around them if you just want to focus on the other aspects. The other cool thing about this is that the events usually follow on storylines from previous events, so you get the sense that you're interacting with a living world. It's a pretty intriguing world, too, with people trying to involve you in get rich quick schemes and various conflicts all over the place, or telling you their life story before joining up with you. 

In fact, a lot goes into the dialogue. Even the NPCs feel like full characters with backstories and personalities, from the person you have to run from New York up to Portland, all the way to the young woman with an abhorrent bandit admirer who gets angry when he's told "no" one too many times. The dialogue also allows a tremendous amount of branching in terms of paths, with multiple methods of completing the main quests, and even some of the sidequests depending on how you react to certain characters. Between this and the extensive quest lines and numerous trips back and forth to the various cities, it does a lot to make the player feel invested in the world. 

Adding to the concrete details are both the variety of train components-- all based on real historical locomotives-- and the in-depth but surprisingly easy to understand economy that charts prices not just on supply and demand, but on the political climate, as the ensuing revolution causes various things to become contraband and prices to spike and fall based on the needs of the various cities. It helps root the game in a sense of history and place, and that accuracy helps sell the realism of the world, even if things are a little more simplified for the sake of gameplay. 

But there are definite problems that need to be addressed. Combat is a kind of scattershot slog, a real-time with pause battlefield where you defend the train from a variety of threats by positioning your people so their field-of-vision cone reaches the enemies and then hoping for the best, occasionally hitting active skills or repairing the train as need be. However, the lack of movement range within the train means that positioning becomes more or less a static thing, as there are only so many optimal positions that exist. The other issue with this is that there's very little range in terms of combat, with a handful of options at most at any given time, the best of which seem to be basic ranged and hand to hand. The other issue is that eventually, when the train becomes overwhelmed in the early stages of the game (before you can upgrade to something a little better) you have to choose between letting your train get overrun by enemies or the train moving forward, making fleeing from the combats an unusually dangerous proposition as opposed to trying to fight.

The difficulty spikes in combat also highlight how grindy the game can get. After the initial tutorial stages, unlocking new routes and upgrading your train can take a lot of swanning up and down the East Coast trading and ferrying people, with quests and assignments not necessarily carrying the load. Highlighting this is the way that, if you aren't careful, there are a few ways to lose in the early stages of the tutorial, from getting stranded in a city with no money to getting killed on the way through a story mission meant to teach you the game, to simple bad luck in an introductory combat. It's frustrating to have to either restart the tutorial again and again or to throw up your hands and play the game in sandbox mode. 

But these issues do little to detract from the true meat of the game, that being a fun trading/adventure hybrid. While the grind may get a little difficult to deal with at times, the result is still a fascinating experience, a free-wheeling trading adventure through early America that offers a decent challenge and easier controls than most trading sims, but with a learning curve that takes a bit to get used to. All in all, though, it's an excellent game. 

Pros:

- Trading game with relatively easy interface

- Incredible depth and complexity

- Great writing

- Can generate stories easily

Cons:

- Can get grindy at the beginning of the game

- Combat kind of kills the game's pacing and rhythm

Warhammer 40,000: Regicide Review

I will give the twisted minds behind the Warhammer 40,000 universe credit, they at least know what they're doing with atmosphere. The series, a reductio ad absurdam of pretty much all science fiction and a little fantasy, is known for its rich atmosphere and utterly insane character designs. (Well, and codex creep, but that's for another article). It's a huge, bombastic setting of spaceships the size of former Soviet republics and ten foot tall warriors with six lungs and specially made ribs. 

Queen takes Bishop. Check. 

Regicide, by comparison, is a tactical strategy game taking some of the elements of chess and mixing them with XCOM and Warhammer 40,000. It's not nearly as expansive as the source material it takes from, but in its own weird, restrained way, it does manage to be a lot of fun. 

Given the blitz of games in the Warhammer universe lately, I don't feel as much of a need to recap the plot, but I'll give a primer for those who are unfamiliar. In the year 40,000, humans have expanded all over the place due to the ability to travel through "the Warp," a terrifying dimensional layer filled with things that literally make people's heads explode just by looking at them. This has taken them all over space, and put them into contact with hyper-aggressive race after hyper-aggressive race, all of which they want to kill for various reasons, and who want to kill them in kind. That's all. That's the plot.

A Blood Angel captures an Orc

But chances are, if you've picked up this game, you haven't picked it up for the rich campaign, so allow me to get into the mechanics: This game is weird. It requires a few games to develop a good tactical strategy, as playing with traditional chess tactics and doing things like attempting to weaken the back rank and truck through the opponent's specialized pieces will end your strategy in a hail of bullets. The game's strategy requires more finesse, using good tactical moves and a variety of special abilities to brutally slaughter the enemy's pieces and win the day. 

Every turn is divided into two phases. The first is the movement phase, which plays exactly like chess. You move one piece a turn, and are allowed to capture pieces if they can move on to an enemy space. But where it gets interesting is the Initiative phase. Every turn, you're given a certain number of action points to spend on things like defenses, grenades, and firing on the enemy. What could be a brilliant chess move suddenly turns into a rout when your piece is left within firing range of three or four enemies that then tear you apart. Similarly, I'm a terrible chess player, but with the added dimensions of being able to fling hand grenades at your opponent's well-developed center, I found myself winning a lot more often. (I may have also had the thing on novice difficulty...shhh...)

There's also an added level of complexity with abilities and orders that advance as you win more matches. Some of these can shield your units from damage, add movement, and restrict your opponent's movement around the field. A lot of these, at the beginning, minimize damage for the most part. 

However, there are two issues I have with the game right now, possibly because it's just been released. First, the boards and backgrounds are kind of boring. As far as I've gotten (played a few games to get the mechanics down), I haven't unlocked many more, and wasn't too interested in getting heavy into online play (losing constantly isn't really something that excites me). Second, it can be a little difficult even with the tutorials to find a good balance on the game. This barrier of entry goes away after a few games, but it is there, and it can be difficult to get used to the strategies. More than once, I found myself winning by a hair after concentrating fire on the enemy King, my board devastated.

In the end, though, it's definitely worth it. It's an interesting take on a classic game, and it has just enough replayability to keep it interesting. 

4/5

Full Disclosure: Reviewer received early-access version of this game