Railgrade review

Railgrade
Developer: Minkata Dynamics
Publisher: Epic Games Publishing
Release Date: 9/22/2022
Platform: Nintendo Switch, PC
MSRP: 19.99

Finally, a logistics simulator that doesn’t make me feel out of my depth.

I have a confession to make: I’m terrible at logistics sims and programming games. That hasn’t stopped me from repeatedly doing them and taking them on, as the concept, that of building an ever-expanding network of supply chains and transit networks that get larger and larger and more complex, sounds really cool and kind of satisfying. Then I get into actually building the darn things, and suddenly the wheels fall off.

Railgrade is not that kind of game. It’s a logistics simulator, to be sure— you’re building a futuristic train network on an alien planet— but there’s a low enough difficulty curve and enough wit and guidance that you don’t feel like you need an advanced degree in programming or three hours with graph paper to plan things out. It’s one of the most relaxing dystopias you’ll ever have the pleasure of experiencing, and manages to make programming and logistics a lot of fun without sacrificing those beautifully complex networks of supply lines and ever-expanding production. If you’ve ever wanted to get into a game with just the right amount of crunch, you can’t do better than Railgrade.

Railgrade places you in charge of the transportation network for Nakatani Chemicals’ space colony. The previous administrator left things in a shambles, forcing you to step in and straighten out their logistics network before further expanding their material and energy production all over the planet. Do well enough, and they’ll give you vouchers and increased responsibilities. Do incredibly well, and they might even let you go back to Earth.

A lot of what makes the game fun is the remarkable amount of care put into the setting. The ‘80s inspired synth soundtrack is purchased in-game through company vouchers for cassette tapes, and then played in-game through what sounds like a minor distortion filter. Your story mode map looks like a diorama, complete with little motorized zeppelins and LED lights for each stop and route across the planet. The story is even conveyed through terminal messages, with your predecessor both snarking at the company that dropped you both into this mess and also hedging on how much of the work you have to do is actually their fault. You can almost taste the burned coffee from the boxy vending machine in the corner and feel the malfunctioning climate control in the Nakatani offices. Even the idea of using automated trains and zeppelins to get around kind of makes the game feel different, a bizarre science fiction dystopia like a darker version of Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth with more obvious jokes.

There’s also a remarkable sense of humor to the game. The terminals, story mode map, and messages of corporate encouragement from Nakatani all highlight the kind of forced cheer that a capitalist dystopia ruled by a megacorporation plundering the environment for resources would push on its employees. It feels of a piece with games like Inifnifactory and Spacechem, a kind of weird and dystopian tone that’s more deadpan and incisive than the broader, wackier humor of something like Journey to the Savage Planet. Everything from your predecessor telling you how he messed up on the tutorial missions and leaving you to fix things on the map. It helps relax the atmosphere a little, allowing you to loosen up and not take the numerous logistics challenges as seriously.

Which ultimately benefits the game. Railgrade excels at making you feel like you can manage the challenges, using a ranking system rather than a pass/fail system, and pushing you to unlock better rewards the more experienced you get, but not punishing you for not figuring things out. It’s not simple, but it is remarkably generous, allowing you to build tracks without having to worry about collisions, and not punishing you for your improper logic gates the way some logistics simulators do. It’s a reminder that games should be enjoyable to play (yes, even those art games that claim playing them shouldn’t be enjoyable, if no one wants to play your game, you’ve failed to make a game), and that most of us do this sort of thing to unwind. Pathfinding is easy to do with very few snarls, supply chains are easy to figure out, and despite a few elements that seem like they could be easily phased out in the early game (looking at you, catalysts), it’s a pretty solid and fun experience.

Which is what the game is. If you’re not into logistics simulations or rail builders, Railgrade won’t get you to change your mind too much. But if you’re looking for a solid, fun experience with some interesting mechanics and a fun theme, Railgrade is definitely one to pick up. It’s a game that encourages you to run faster routes, unlock more of the game, and just in general play around without as much fear that you’ll definitely mess something up. It’s excellent for a mid-level rail simulator, and if this interests you at all, it’s a good game to pick up.

The Good:
- Excellent story and atmosphere
- Fun soundtrack
- Relaxing progression and unlockable rewards
- A solid experience without heavy crunch or weird pathfinding

The Bad
- Maybe you don’t like train simulators, and in that case it would be a bad idea to play this one
- Lack of time controls can get annoying

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