Yesterday, upon finding out that the demo had been recently released, I picked it up from my favorite demo source.
I was pretty excited about playing this demo, since the last game of this genre I played was Transport Tycoon and to this day, that game would have to be in my top five.
The file was a pleasant size ~200mb and installed quickly and easily. It also loaded quickly, and I was able to crank up the graphics settings (probably a bit too much in hindsight) and get into the tutorial pretty quickly. The tutorial was fairly typical, asking you to carry out actions and then moving on to the next topic. It occurred to me that it was fairly likely that you would mess something up, and thus break the tutorial. If you couldn’t “complete” what the tutorial wanted you to do, then it wasn’t going to continue.
It didn’t take long.
After attempting to create a second train on my track, they ended up facing each other at an impasse, and no amount of extra track and signal building seemed to be able to resolve the problem. In transport tycoon you could quite easily skip a train’s destination, and hence make it turn round. I’m sure there’s something like that here, but it wasn’t immediately apparent.
The in-game graphics were pretty cool. The cities looked alive, and I’m sure that as time passes, and they develop and modernise, the graphics will look even more impressive.
I thought the train looked a little cartoonish, but I’m sure that’s a subjective question. The environment was very nicely detailed and all the bits and pieces in between operated well. On the graphics front however, there was one notable exception, this:
The aberration pictured above is the “route planning” window. The actual process is pretty simple. You get to this screen by creating a new train. You then add carriages in the modal window displayed, and then select it’s destination by clicking on the massive white dot which represents a station.
So the process is good, but when so much effort has been put into the other graphics of the game, it’s a bit of a letdown to come to this screen and for things to have been done so poorly. For instance the icons for the carriages don’t look like what they are, which could be easily resolved. Perhaps it will be patched, or perhaps this simplicity is necessary for managing the complexity of later stages of the game, but I felt it let them down.
I’m glad I started this article by saying that the last game of this genre I played was TT. Because I think many of my perspectives are strongly influenced by that game. For instance, in that game you had to do everything yourself. You had to own the land, build the tunnels, the bridges, the stations and track, manage earth moving and a huge number of other tasks.
In fact, when you eventually managed to build a profitable route, it was the pinnacle of a costly and time consuming project management exercise. Seeing the train chug through the tunnels and across the bridges you had agonised over was what made the game what it was.
I also loved the fact that in order to build the large airport in the middle of a massive city, you had to be an utter bastard. Since no council was going to let you bulldoze buildings in the central city in later stages, I would pick a few cities, and bulldoze huge areas and build unconnected roads which would later be bulldozed to build a massive airport.
In my play of the game (which was extremely limited) it seemed that all these tasks were automated. For example, one of the instructions in the tutorial was. “Click on the ‘build tracks’ button and drag your tracks from Baltimore into the centre of Washington.”
Upon releasing the mouse button, the PC carried out earthworks, built a tunnel, the track, bulldozed the necessary sections in Washington and took some money for it.
I was left thinking, “hmm, that was effortless.” And once the train started chugging I felt no sense of achievement whatsoever.
So, I think this game is well made, looks good, and seems to carry and improve a number of aspects of previous similar games. However I do wonder whether, by simplifying the game play, they’ve lost a key aspect of what makes these games what they are.
I won’t be picking it up.
Posted in Gaming | |
