This is a pretty good transportation and city management simulator. Different from the likes of SimCity where you zone areas, this game you want to encourage growth by providing transportation services and infrastructure and watch your city grow around your efforts.

The UI is a bit clunky in some areas, but efficient in others. Very steep learning curve, but it's given me hours of entertainment already and for me, a big part of the fun of a new game is figuring it out.

One thing I will say is the economic modelling is a bit too simplistic (there's only one type of 'freight' your trains move around.) This game could benefit hugely if the devs took a look at the original Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for a much better way to do industry and train management.

But all in all, it's a pretty decent game. Just could have been so much more if the devs looked at it's predessors a bit more closely for successful ways of putting this type of game together (as mentioned before, original Railroad Tycoon.)

This game is openttd and simcity on steroids!

Pro's:
- Finally a good challenge. This is definitely not a western easy win game. It takes a good while to get used to the user interface and there is a lot of information hidden behind buttons.
- Big complex railroads. Every turn and stop is customizable for trains/busses/trucks including depature times (Some settings you have to enable under options).
- Big economic aspect. The economics is an important part of this game. It even includes a stock market! If you just want to build: The 'Map Creator' can be used as a sandbox mode.
- More than trains: You can build hunderds of different buildings (Which are really obvious inspired from real Japanese buildings). And then you can try to earn a profit with those buildings as well.
- Big maps with cities which are actually the size of a city!

Cons:
- It really misses an easy way to get used to the game and learn the shortcuts (Controls and UI takes some time to get used to)
- No Japanese trains, just trains which are very inspired from Japanese trains
- No multiplayer mode

Can you look over the initial steep learning curve and do you like a big complex city simulation game? Then this is for you.

I already saw and played this game long long time ago, and didn't like it. Actually, I didn't understand it. You need a lot of patient to start in this game, as it has huge barriers for newcomers. But I'm glad I was persistent this time, its worth it!

So, the game is kind of a CiM 2 on steroids. But don't expect anything like CiM, its a different game. Its more of macro management, more focused on the financial parts.

Lets talk about the difficulties first. Always have in mind the game is Japanese, so they do think different from us ("western ppl?"). Anyway, its a different mindset, and you need to take some time to adapt.

- No real tutorial, not a big community around it. Hard to find information online.
- Most things are not obvious out of the box, so you need to be patient, like how to move the camera etc. Its all configurable, so you need to be patient if things seems weird at first.
- The entire game mechanic cannot be discovered in the game. You will need to go online and read. There are documentation out there and forums, but don't expect to Alt + TAB, cry and get an answer. Sit and read!
- There are no indication of how many passengers are waiting at a station. You can only see when they board the train. There are no passengers or vehicles in the city, only your vehicles. Its an old game and as all old games its focused on gameplay not graphics. So expect a lot of gameplay features.


Challenges I faced:

- The game is extremely hard. You can't just play around and be happy (but there is sandbox mode). You have to carefully think about every move. You need to plan and you need to think. Its like in the real world. You cannot have 1 headquarters and make 1 line and be profitable. A company to be profitable need more than 1 route. You have to make scale profit. You will inevitably have losses for long time till you can have a profit.
- Camera movements are tricky. I even thought about making a video about it. You can move the camera in many many ways, but not as simple and effective as CiM 2.
- Easy route design as CiM ? Forget about it. You will kiss CO feet after this game. You need to program every station, every train, every platform, every intersection. There is a copy/paste tool to make it easier, but in no way its user friendly. For long time I thought: "WHAT? This is absurd. Its really like that?" But then its a Japanese game. Its a different mindset. In a way its quite nice. It allows you to do many things.
- There are no signals. Its all down to schedules. First I thought that was a real bad limitation, but then I realised you can actually program everything to be so smooth that signals are unnecessary. Perhaps that is how it works in Japan? You program every train, every departure and arrival time so the train smoothly goes without getting stuck. And this is what motivates me now, cause its challenging. If you miss by 1 minute, you can screw the whole network.


What is different from other games and make it very complex and deep:

- You have to move construction materials around the city with trucks or freight trains. Nothing is built without it. You cannot make an apartment if construction materials are not available.
- You control city transport but you can also buy offices, shops, apartments and get money from them. Like the old RRT2. You can also build them from scratch.
- Value of the land dramatically change with development, and so your costs to build in this land. Even lay tracks and roads are more expensive in the city compared to rural areas.
- You can build public buildings, such as parks to develop the area. Its like OpenTTD way to make a good for the city when you have more money than you need.
- There are airports, harbours, connection to the city outlimits, and possibility to make roads for the city. AI also exist to develop the city.
- There is stock market, you can buy and sells shares. You also get dividends and pay taxes.
- Very complex financial report. Not that simplistic CiM approach.
- There are big projects such as Maglev trains and airports.
- Track laying is very flexible. Compared to Train Fever, which is very limited, in A Train 9 its great. You can make several types of intersections, Y sections, crosses, etc.
- You can change time speed out of the box. You can make time goes as slow as 1 minute = 1 hour IRL. You can also speed up time about 300x. Yes, that is right, 300 times. No lag, always smooth. The beauty of old games.
- Day and night cycle. Very decent graphics.

at the moment i cant recommend this game but im going to put more time in and see it to later gameplay

as with all city building/transport games there is a hurdle to jump this game has a high hurdle and no real manual (appently the japanese one is very detailed)

Cons:
# this game gives next to no user feedback, you dont know how many people are at a station what to go to place x or even what a city is lacking its all guesswork, or even the radius of a station. this is the biggest flaw in the game

# schedules/timetables seem to be a mistranslation, you dont get to alter them like a normal time schedule instead you have to do each "unit" individually, even if you want 2-3 bus's on the same route you have to do each one separately, this consists of following the bus/train and guiding its every move until you have completed a circuit, or they just run about randomly. (i have found that you can have a tick box in the options menu to allow a global timetable for a while, i assume this means after you "guide" your 1st bus/train anything placed untill this is unticked will follow the same path

#unlike the japanese version you have very limited trains again, you will have access to about 20 or trains (due to licensing as they used real trains in the jap version)

#for long term city builders outside this game we have got use to certain functions like moving the camera by panning or using say wasd, you cant in this game and you cant set keybinidngs

#(a con for most people) there is no tutorial in any way, comming from other builders you may have a seance of what to do though

Pro's

#while slightly dated graphics there use a sort of comic cell shaded approach which works quite nicly

#materials, its nice to have a justifiable building material rather than just spending the money and pop a building appears

#amount of content, there is plenty of buildings of varying type and variations to have a varied, somewhat realistic looking city

#replaybility, with all thats to learn it will likly take a good few playthoughs to get a good concrete strategy going

#control of intersections. you can adjust the way intersections act to help guide where they go, however no vechical cant contridict the rules, which can cause problems with larger stations

Train sim and citybuilder rolled into one, with a living city.
Your city will evolve (housing will be made into appartments etc. by the AI) if you provide it with transportation and building materials.
A very extensive financial system, which includes a stockmarket and several types of taxation

A Classic made even better.

I wanted to hold off writing a review on this game because first impressions can be impulsive and the first impression of this game, for me, was farily negative. Having now played it for around 30 hours I believe I have discovered the enoyment that is somewhat buried beneath its initially frustrating exterior.

The first thing I would have to say to players who have played other transit games such as OpenTTD/Simutrans/Locomotion previously is to discard most of the notions that have made you successful at those games. The fundamental challenge of A-Train is the flow of passengers and materials throughout a city rather than source and destination.

A-Train does not seem to care one lick where people are going-- they seemingly have no destination, only a time that they commonly depart. To clarify, passengers in a residential area will gather at their respective stations to depart around 8:00am while passengers in a business area will gather at around 6:00pm. However, it does not matter one iota whether the passengers from the residential areas are actually transported to the business area-- they will happily get off the bus/train at any point in between which is good because, in my experience thus far, A-Train tends to penalize long hauls rather than reward them. The most critical notion you will need to discard is your desire to move materials a huge distance across the map-- it pays you for units of cargo delivered with either a negligible or no bonus for distance moved: Picking up a 6 car freight load of materials will pay $60k on delivery whether the train trip lasts 8 hours or 24 hours. The only difference is how much profit is whittled away on the empty return journey of the freight train.

For a first timer, I would recommend making a mostly blank map with maybe a factory and a power plant pre-placed with between $500m - $1b starting capital and working from there. There will be a good deal of confusion if you just throw yourself into an existing scenario with an assortment of vehicles and routes already in place.

Also, and this bit is important, be sure you go to the Options menu, Schedule tab and check every single box available to you-- why these aren't the defaulted settings I have no idea, but the bulk of the game in terms of scheduling will be unavailable to you without the Scheduling options enabled. Your busses and trains will behave like idiot children and you will be left wondering how anything so primitive ever found a publisher! The meat and potatoes of this game is managing and optimizing the time tables of your transit routes. If optimizing routes and a fair amount of micro management is not your idea of a good time, you should avoid this game-- you will not have fun.

You must also be prepared to engage in most aspects of the game: subsidiaries are your friend, the stock market is your friend, do not simply ignore them and hope for the best-- costs, especially in developed areas are extremely high so you will need the money! Be prepared to observe and understand why you failed your first few times playing, because that seems to be the most likely outcome.

Overall:

Graphics 8/10 - Some might disagree with me on this, complain about textures etc and how it doesn't look light a high budget photo realistic game, but to me the graphics have their own charm, do their job and aren't a huge drain on the frame rate. The game cycles from night to day and in between seasons and once your town/city/metropolis starts to develop it has a very nice feel to it.

Sound 3/10 - The sound in this game is not good, I wish there was a nicer way to say it. You get some basic train and bus sounds and railway crossing sounds etc but it all falls flat-- The music is faily nice but only seems to play on the first of the month... at the rate the game progresses you won't be hearing it very often unless you're permanently playing on super-turbo speed.

Control 6/10 - Some clunky menus and odd placement methods and navigation require some getting used to. Once you get the hang of it, it is functional and will do what you tell it to but it lacks the intuitive nature of many of its contemporaries. Also: There are no rail signals, they will behave in a block manner and will not detonate explosively by running into one another. To have a working, complex rail network you will have to manage your trains departures, arrivals, switch points etc. Do not expect to throw multiple trains on a rail line and expect it to be functional, let alone profitable.

Gameplay Initially 3/10, Revised 8/10 - Your first impression of this game will probably be bad, you're going to have to experiment a little bit before you find the enoyment in this game. Coming from other transportation sim games I cannot fathom your first impression would be overwhelmingly positive. It is complex with basically no instruction on how to play. You have been warned: you will need to put in a good amount of time.

Overall ??/10 - This is a complicated niche game, period. To me, personally, the overall would be about ~7.5-8/10, but this will vary widely depending on what kind of games you like and how you like to play them. To reiterate what I've said previously, do not buy this if management of timetables, arrivals, departures, switches, days of the week, months of the year etc. etc. etc. are not your cup of tea. If you just want to throw down a very long line, pick up coal and deliver it across the map, play OpenTTD!

Addendum:
$60 is steep for this title, I would not recommend paying $60 for it and I did not pay $60 for it, on sale in the mid $30s seems about right. Time will tell about DLC content, the train options are seriously lacking and there is no shortage of existing A-Train players complaining about the lack of trains, especially those found in the Japanese editions. Hopefully it's something that gets rectified in the coming months.

Recommended with caveats. For those new to the Atrain series, it is similar to other city building/simulator games you have played such as SimCity, RailRoad Tycoon, Tropico, Cities XL, etc. The most important differentiator is that much of the expansion in Atrain happens organically - as you build your railroad and trucking infrastructure, new apartments, shopping centers and office buildings will be built by npc corporations around your infrastructure. The better you manage shipping freight and transporting passengers the faster these areas will grow.

The maps are huge and the building options are very deep indeed. As of this writing the trains are generic but still divided into quite a few different categories (freight, express freight, commuter, express passenger, etc.). For those looking for real-life trains you'll be disappointed at this time, but apparently the devs are working on licensing those trains. I've found the selection deep enough at this time to be enjoyable.

The graphics aren't going to win any awards, but provide enough detail to be passable for a modern day city simulator. Let's face it, most of us only zoom in to view the graphical detail once or twice during the lifetime of a game, then spend the rest at the strategic view anyway! I am running at the highest detail level with a relatively mediocre system and everything runs very smoothly. The city buildings look great as they expand over time, but the one thing that is missing for me is traffic on the roads. As you build freight trucks and busses they roam the cities to move goods or people - but they are the ONLY vehicles driving on the roads. I think a few token cars driving around the cities just for show would go a long way to bring the cities to life.

This game is not all that easy (it's easy to go broke), which for me is fantastic! Too many other games such as Simcity and Tropico make it waaaay too easy to get started and get to the point where money is essentially no object. Here you need to carefully monitor each facet of your empire and plan how you are going to expand. You can't simply buy a new train, build a new route and expect the profits to roll in.

Now onto some of the uglier areas of Atrain that need some work. The good news here is that I think all of this can be fixed over time with patches.

Atrain 9 is apparently a port from a popular Japanese version. After playing for about 14 hours or so it explains some of the odd menu selections. For instance, you can go into great detail when creating a schedule for any of your vehicles (trains, trucks or busses) using the Timetable Assistant - as your vehicle reaches an intersection you can define which path it should take (very powerful once you discover that feature!) - but the button to continue after you have set the paramaters is labeled 'Continuous'. That was very confusing to me at first because I didn't understand if that meant every intersection would use the same parameters. But knowing that this is a port there are some language translations that aren't perfect - in this example Continuous should be Continue.

As others have mentioned, Atrain 9 does not have a useful manual and completely lacks a tutorial. Luckily there are some very useful YouTube videos created by the developers and others that explain some of the important features of the game. I mentioned the Timetable Assistant earlier - when I first started playing my trucks and busses seemed to be going in circles and across the map without concern for where I was placing new roads to optimize their path. The reason is that you need to carefully outline their path using the Timetable Assistant to make them fulfill the task you intend for them.

The financial reporting is a mixed bag in this game so far. From a macro-level the reporting is very good. You can see a detailed balance sheet that includes a breakdown of each major category of income and expense, including taxes in the game. They save the data from year to year so you can carefully monitor what areas are flourishing and which are languishing. It's also fairly easy to see the profitability of buildings that you own, such as factories, apartments or shopping centers. However, they need to improve the reporting for the trains, buses and trucks. They do show the expense and revenue for trains on a daily basis, but it's not terribly useful as it resets at midnight of each game day. So if you have a train that picks up cargo at 11pm and delivers it the next day at 11am, you don't see the total expenses for travel or cargo pickup when it has finished its route, just the expenses for that game day. This makes it very difficult to understand the long term profitability of a train.

Lastly the price. $60 is too much for this game in its current state, and probably even with the improvements I have outlined above. It's more like a $40 game when you compare it to similar games in the genre, many of which have vastly superior user interfaces. I got it at a slight discount at $50 and don't regret it at all, but my recommendation would be to wait till the price drops or it goes on sale. By that time I'm sure they will have rectified some of the minor issues so you'll get more value for your dollar.

Overall I think it's a fun game - it has tremendous depth and potential with some rough edges. If you like deep city simulators that require attention to detail, this game is worthy of your time. Just be patient when you get started because the learning curve is steep due to a lack of tutorials or useful in-game help. I've had a lot of 'AHA' moments since I started that once I figured something out made the game that more enjoyable.

I love city builders and railroad games, and I think this game is great. I'm still a noob and am learning the ropes, but I am loving every minute of it. It is kind of like Cities in Motion 2 mixed with a little SimCity. It does have a very steep learning curve, but if you stick with it and do your homework (scour the Internet for homemade videos), you can succeed. I'm only a few hours into it and I am already starting to make good progress. Just be patient. Be prepared to scrap a few of your cities and start over again as you learn how things work.

Pros: Nice graphics, detailed management, runs smoothly on my PC (see specs below). The designs and layouts you can make are amazing. By far the best track design capabilities I have seen.

Cons: No real tutorials to get you going. A little pricey, but I do not have buyer's remorse. Not as many trains as Japanese version because of licensing, but I have read that they will update the number of trains for free once they develop some Euro models (unless it costs them too much, in which case it will be paid DLC).

Core Specs:
CPU - i7 4820K
RAM - 16GB
HD - Samsung 840 Pro SSD
VC - 4GB GeForce 770 GTX

Don't let the price tag scare you away. This is a great transport/business simulator. There is a steep learning curve. But being an old school game, I think the difficulty is right where it should be. The graphics are crisp and smooth even on very high settings in extremely dense cities, and I'm not running a power house computer. If you need a city builder fix, but don't want to deal with Electronic Arts (Simcity) and under developed clones (Cities in Motion). This is your game. If you are an old A-Train fan, you won't be disapointed.

A-Train 9 demands your patience. If you don't have any or are expecting a quick game in the vein of Transport Tycoon, Cities in Motion, Locomotion and the like, then you will be disappointed. If you are willing to think about how you develop your rail and road network while building up a portfolio of real estate and manufacturing plants, or dabbling in the stockmarket, then you this is the game for you.

Don't be put off by the famously poor game manual - you can learn all you need to know in a few minutes of online video and forum research - and don't be dismayed by the lack of many trains on release. There is still plenty in this game to keep you going until the day that new trains arrive (Freebie? Paid DLC?).

Am I happy with the level of communication shown by the Dev or publisher before release? No. Did I think twice about buying V3? Yes indeed, expecially as I only bought into V1 a month before V3 was released. Do I regret buying either V1 or V3? Absolutely not.

This game isn't for all. In fact it should carry a warning. But think of it this way: the negativity surrounding the game centres on the disparity between the number of trains in the Japanese version and the sparsity of trains in this Steam version, coupled with the price. There is very little negativity regarding gameplay or general content. For those buyign the game new then it's your money, it's your choice to buy. For those with Steam V1, you get 50%, so what are you waiting for?

First Impressions:

I'll be honest...I'm new to the series and after an hour of playing, was no closer to figuring out just what it was I was supposed to do. This game is pretty complex with a wide range of gameplay options. Not only are you tasked with building and maintaining a successful transportation network, but you'll also need to construct urban structures across multiple categories. My jaw dropped when I saw the different buildings available..."A-Train 9 V3.0" puts "SimCity" to shame in that regard. It also does some things that "Train Fever" doesn't, helping me to put that game into perspective.

With that said, there are a few things about the game that rub me the wrong way. For one, there's no options menu on the main menu. After some doing, I figured out that you can adjust the audio volumes and toggle a few graphics settings when playing a scenario, but there's no screen resolution dropdown nor is there a fullscreen toggle. You can, however, drag/resize the game window around manually. There's also no in-game tutorial which is almost a necessity for a game as complex as this, thought there is a "manual" button that opens your browser and directs you to the online rulebook. Still, I'd prefer something interactive...it's just the way I prefer to learn.

There's also the issue of V1.0 being released on Steam in May of 2014. Those that didn't know that V3.0 was coming might feel a bit jipped to have to pay another $60.00 for this updated version. To be fair, V1.0 was released in Japan in 2010 so the game that's available on Steam is four years old...but I think it's bad timing to release them back to back like this and expect customers to pay for both. At the very least, a discount should have been offered similar to what Cities XL 2011 did for Cities XL owners.

I will say that I had a blast with the custom map editor, though without understanding how the buildings work, it'll be difficult to keep your checkbook on the plus side. I also enjoyed the ambience, though disappointed by the lack of street traffic. Building stations and connecting them seemed pretty easy, but without knowledge of the game's inner workings, you won't be able to really plan for the long haul all that much. I can't offer a final opinion as I haven't played the game enough to fully understand it, so I'll give it a thumbs up based on its complexity/gameplay options alone and opt to reserve the right to change my opinion when I'm ready to offer one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He8IR_NeqIE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MnbuLHB-Mk

It's the first A-Train game that i've played, and i played a lot of railroad sims before, so I have to say that this game is many times complicated to play. It has a lot of mechanics that differ from real world that I think that is stupid, like a station mantain behavior on arraving vehicles and, beforehand, in real life, the vehicle mantains it schedule.

It has a very simple manual that not explain the things too deeply and you have to make trial and error runs to understand how things work, making you waste time that you could be playing the game.

If you want a game to play right away, I do not recommend this game. But if you are an railway fan it may be interesting.

This is a total piece of garbage and all but unplayable on my quad core PC with 4 gigs of ram. Missing DLL's.

In the few missions I tried there are several road/rail connections that you cant make but there is no logical reason. 2 Roads that seem logical to connect but when you try to build that connection there is absolutely no way to complete it.

Terrible waste of 60 bucks

missing dll's and no sound, $60 bucks