An RPS article on Train Valley and EA railway game on steam, saying it looks pretty complete and plays very well. Looks like a combination of puzzle game with route building and some luck re maps and cities.
Price seems good at £7 as well.
I saw this yesterday and the article stated it was fun! May have to give this a try.
From the article and from watching the screenshots, seems like a kind of Real-time version of TrainYard, only without colour mixing. (So, not like trainyard at all? :))
And a year later: I now own this.
It’s pretty good, though the “tutorial” is pretty terrible. But the game is simple so you should figure it out quite quickly. It’s a decently challenging “puzzle” game, kind of inbetween mini-metro and Railway Tycoon.
There’s a demo on steam.
Yeah, I picked it up too. It’s more of a time-management game than anything; but the strategy around building tracks is fun. Probably worth it for some light toy train puzzleyness.
I purchased Train Valley a couple of months ago and have spent quite a few hours playing it since then. It’s a great coffee break game and it’s on sale at Steam for $4.99 U.S.
4,[email protected] [chrono.gg does have quite a good deal from time to time…and daily-deals live on here :-) Since someone here mentioned the site I’m calling it up every day…]
Not sure if I’d like Train Valley though… too much of a puzzle-game, I fear.
If you are looking for Railroad Tycoon IV, don’t buy Train Valley because it is a different type of game entirely. Check out this video to see what it’s about.
Pod’s description of the game as a cross of MiniMetro and Railroad Tycoon is a very good one. It’s definitely closer to MiniMetro.
The odd thing is how trains seem to teleport to a station. It makes its delivery and then disappears. Eventually another station has a load to deliver and you can send it on its way. I didn’t notice if a train had to have last stopped at that station for it to be available to leave from that station with a load. It didn’t appear to need to. Most of the game is about managing the trains running their routes and controlling their paths via switches - and trying to build a reasonable efficient track layout too.
Edit: A leaderboard would be welcome - fun chasing scores.
I noticed there is a leaderboard that has a dropdown for Season 1, 2, 3, etc. Anyone know what the heck you need to play to get on the leaderboard?
I just got the game (Thank you, awesome person who gave this to me!), and I could see me enjoying it if not for a thing that is driving me litterally crazy. Keyboard-crushing levels of crazy. What decides what seems like the random switching of the… switches (sic)? Are you supposed to micromanage them all the time, and is the game trying to make my trains go the wrong way on purpose? [explicit]!
You switch the switches by clicking on them. They don’t change on their own. You can click on a train to pause it and also can reverse its direction.
Actually, I may have run into a bug, as that random switching (which happened anytime a train entered a station) hasn’t occured past the first map.
Now though, I am frustrated by the interface’s lacunas. This makes Train Valley more of a memory game than anything else in my still limited experience with it, which leaves me a bit sad as I really enjoy optimizing the tracks’ layout - but that doesn’t seem to be the primary goal of the game at all.
I’m not sure what you mean by a memory game. The placement of the stations are randomized each time you play a map.
Having played the same maps over and over, my experience is that the stations are placed always at the same spots, but not appearing in the same order, excepting maybe for the initial ones.
I’ll describe what I mean by it being a memory game: the game lets you build tracks, pause the action leisurely, but doesn’t keep an handy list of the trains you activated. So here I am, game paused, activating two trains and drawing more layouts, spending a few more minutes designing or optimizing my tracks. Then, of course, I forgot I activated that train over there as I activate another one, whose course will overlap with it. Yes, the game displays (dimly) an icon when you activated a train, but the absence of a list and the weird colour dependence (if they would just use station names instead!) doesn’t ease my interactions. So far, I have played for over 2 hours on the same 3 maps because I just will commit an error of that kind at some point, every time. What’s that? I could just stop activating trains while paused? ;)
Yea, it’s definitely true that there are predetermined spots that the stations will appear at. We probably approach the game a bit differently as I don’t think I found the train activation an issue. I may have been more cautious or something activating the trains.
[It’s been a while, but:
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Every time a train goes over a track, doesn’t it flip the track-switches? I remember you need to pay careful attention every time a train goes through something as it’ll mess it up for the next one. Edit: Thinking about, and watching a youtube video to confirm, If a train goes through a junction it’ll align it to the way it’s going.
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All trains that are active have a floaty coloured icon above them. So if you’re paused you can see them all, even if they’re in a tunnel or still in the starting station.
How’s the replayability of this game? I see there’s a sandbox mode. Are there any sort of high-score or achievement goals in that mode?
Since the leaderboards don’t seem to be working (they are empty for me), I’ll post my scores here so people have something to compare to. I’d be interested to see others scores here too.
Season 1 (Europe - first tab): 114,940
Season 2: (USA - second tab): 202,270
Season 3: (Russia - third tab): 215,000
Season 4: (Japan - fourth tab): 220, 640
There is a leaderboard, but it doesn’t seem to work. You do get a score for the last mission on each tab, so you could try and beat your prior score. It doesn’t look like there is any money in sandbox, so it seems like it is there to let the player just build whatever they want without the challenge of money.