Well... good old Trainz... (or bad old Trainz?). Well, actually Trainz 12 SP1 is not so bad. It has very good Steam integration, it can download old add on packs as DLCs (apart from DLCs themselves) and although it is a bit laggy and its graphics are, at best, uneven - if you are into (model) railroading, this one might not be a bad choice...

Terrible.

I dislike the way the company that does Train Simulator (2014 as of this writing) does business and hoped to find an alternative to satisfy my love of simulations and trains. I have been told several times that Trainz is the superior product anyway and that I should get it. I have no idea what the people who said this to me were even thinking.

The instructions are awful, essentially non-existent, so you need to try to figure out the interface yourself. This is possible but takes time to navigate the proprietary lingo and general disorganization. I somehow deleted (or it just disappeared) a section of the HUD that gave me info on upcoming speed limits, the grade of the track, etc., and I never got it back, making the game unplayable unless all you really want to do is try to derail everything. The only online communities I could find for help were all geared toward content creation, which seems to be the only thing people really enjoy about this since, I suppose, they can charge unwitting suckers like myself for it. The section of the official wiki dealing with driving the train doesn't even exist. The "manual" tells you the keys for doing things, but this is very basic and covers none of the actual problems you'll face.

The map? You navigate it by right-clicking on individual points that are all buried in a massive amount of labeling, none of which tells you any information you might actually need until you've zoomed in so close you've lost all context. You can't rotate it, but it will rotate on its on depending on the orietnation of your train. There's no helpful color coding for cities vs. depots vs. any of the countless other things you need to find. I am offended that this map even exists.

Also, on modern computers (i7) with good graphics cards (GTX 660) -- the performance is worse than on Windows XP and an old Geforce 8600. I mean, bad. Textures won't load sometimes. When they do, they load very slowly. The game simply stops working for seconds at a time.

The whole experience was just awful, bad enough that I actually took the time to write this review after finally giving up.

I could go into more detail, but no one would bother reading it anyway. Suffice to say, I spent hours on this game just trying to do one scenario. I got through it and immediately deleted the game. I wish I could delete it from my memory.

This game would have been amazing... However, I have an up to date system, and it runs like total s**t... The game play seems like it would have been a lot of fun, but ever time I change were the camera is it gets choppy or freezes all together. If they where to optimize it, it would be fanastic.

I have spent many hours happily playing this game, but I can't really recommend it as a "game" because of a couple things:

1) Framerate, audio, entire application responsiveness takes a massive hit without severely limiting texture qualities and draw distance, making for a high cost to actually take advantage of the game's optimized graphics options. Two upgraded computers later, I still have to cripple the draw distance and texture quality in order to play without the game regularly freezing up for a few seconds every time a bunch of new content needs to be drawn, such as when you pan the camera around.

2) Included sessions (for which there are steam achievements) are often glitchy or tempermental in their willingness to aknowledge your progress. A signal which should change automatically doesn't, resulting in you being unable to complete a session after investing an hour or more into it. Or a session will suggest you are driving a long train, however you are only driving a locomotive with no actual stock attached. Usually I like retail "games" to have more polish than this, and feel that this superb simulator is, unfortunately, not so superb a "game".

Further dissuading me from pushing this game on my friends is the fact that the developer, n3v/auran, has now embarked on a kickstarter campaign to fund creation of the next revision of the Trainz series, "Trainz: A New Era." I don't expect the glitches or engine to get any extra polish/performance at this point.


That all said, however, I have enjoyed this game quite a bit since I got it. The driving experience lets you choose often (in some sessions you are forced to use one or the other) whether to use DCC or CAB mode. DCC seems to emulate an electric model railroad with a simple knob to control movement. CAB mode attempts to emulate real railroads (I am not qualified to say how close it comes) by making the user interact with the reverser (forward/reverse/neutral), a range of throttle notches from -9 to 9, and, for when the engine is pulling cars and the e-brake won't cut it, a complex train brake where you cycle through initial -> lap -> application and watch the various brake pipe/cyl pressures adjust as they eventually bring the train to a stop. The graphics can be nice, and seems many in-game objects have detailed dynamic behavior, from trees which have different graphics for each season, to train cars which have specific loading/unloading animations. The content update hub is also a place for users to post their own content, and for other players to add it to their own collection, not unlike the steam workshop. One can download locomotives, stock, scenery, routes, sessions, etc. which the community has uploaded simply by searching the interface and choosing to download it. The system addresses revisions by content publishers in the community so that new revisions are included when other players with their content perform normal content updates.

The game has a surveyor mode, where you can create your own train routes and sessions, laying out terrain, tracks, signals, scenery, triggers, session start/end points, etc.. I played with it a little, covering the wireframe ground with snow and a loop of track that had a switch leading off to a roundhouse, in which I had some community-provided engines. I got distracted long before I created anything fancy. As others have documented, building a world is a very time consuming process, and some people take months or years on works which they still consider incomplete. While working on your route/session in surveyor mode, you can fire up driver mode to drive through your creation and test it out and have some fun. If you are happy with the results, you can then publish them to the hub of community content.

All in all, I think this game is a great sandbox, with some crazy demanding requirements for full graphics performance, and a handful of glitchy/buggy sessions. While the community may continue to contribute content to the game, allowing content to continue to evolve, the engine is dated and not looking like it will ever have its performance-based frustrations addressed. For the retail price, there are almost certainly more actively developed train simulator solutions. If you already own it though, or it is on sale, you may get many hours of fun out of it.

Despite the graphics engine the game is very good, cause of the variety of routes, vehicles (engines or not), very good HUD, easy to operate editor, tones of freeware and logical price payware.
If you are train enthusiast you are going to love it, if you just like playing with simulators, its the best choice for sure and if you just like to play driving games compared to Train simulator 2014 it has lower quality graphics but way more routes, locomotives and the DCC mode (easy to operate mode, no hard times with the realistic things) and all of this without the DLCs, plus it is way more cheap than ts 2014 (DLCs).
I strongly recommend this game!