The visuals and sound of this game clearly had a lot of work put into them, this game looks *very* good for a game without a dedicated artist, and honestly better than a lot of games i've seen with dedicated artists. Theres a lot of nice touches - the main menu especially bought a lot of goodwill with how pressing a button caused the cute train animation! i liked it a lot lol
But if i had to summarise the gameplay of this game, i would call it a roguelike without player agency.
I was never short on rails, so the whole rail planning aspect was a bit of a nothingburger. Maybe if i had the mountain synergy upgrade it might've, but i never saw that upgrade at a point i wanted to take it in all of my time playing. I would usually make no changes to my rail network each day.
The between-level upgrades were maybe this game's weakest point. I believe there were 5?? But of the bunch, i'd only say 3 were worthy of inclusion. Im gonna go through them all here
- The weakest by far was "safety cuts", which read "increase passengers by 200%, but 1% chance per rail to lose 50% of them and this upgrade". This upgrade doesnt form part of a build and the balancing is tight, so to me this read far more like "1% chance that you might just lose at any time".
- Next, i'd say "returning train" was just boring. It was just a simple quota reduction. Sure, it might work alongside a wider roster of more wacky upgrades, but alone it was just a bit of a nothingburger
- Railroad workers, by itself, does nothing. Even without taking it i never struggled for rails, so with it,,, yeah.
- Savings is what made railroad workers interesting - Together, the two apply a scaling multiplier bonus. This synergy was very appealing, but i always died on day 3 or 4 so it never came into effect
- Finally, the *best* upgrade (and the one you should iterate on) is the mountain one. Its peak.
The worst part of this upgrade system was how you could be shown multiple copies of the same upgrade, just at different rarities. I very often only had an effective choice between two, and once i saw the quota upgrade (my second least favourite!) 3x at once, being forced to take it. Definitely change this!!!.
The random map was fine i think, but lead to *wild* imbalances from run to run. This is part of why i dont think this game has any player agency - The map generation is 99% of whether you'll live or die on day 3. The only time i ever made it to lvl4 was because a large number of large stations spawned close to the middle. You need some additional map gen rules to ensure each run is equally balanced.