Hmm, okay, thanks. I might give it a whirl. The price is certainly right.
At $2.99 this may of finally reached a price point where I’m willing to pull the trigger, where did you guys land on this one ultimately, worth a spin or pass?
It is fairly light on strategy, but I enjoyed playing it quite a bit. It can get slightly hectic, but you can pause. You need to be able to kinda visualize the timing of the multiple trains and what switches need to be switched to get the trains to their destinations. Definitely worth that price to me.
Thanks for the input, I’ll have to give that one some consideration, certainly at that price there’s not much risk!
There’s also a demo (kids, ask your parents) on Steam. I fooled around a bit with it earlier, but it wasn’t quite enough to get me to pull the trigger. I probably will in the next couple of days if something more enticing doesn’t come along.
Not sure why, but demos are just something I can’t be bothered with, I realize it makes absolutely no sense. So ultimately I either buy a game or not. About the best I can do in terms of quasi rational behavior when it comes to game purchasing is waiting till they’re on sale. Then apparently I’m tapped out on my rationality reserves.
Reminds me of the equally non-nonsensical way I used to treat DVR recordings back when I had cable TV, I recorded them but never watched them. So no matter how elaborate my efforts in tracking down and recording great stuff to watch, I still just ended up watching whatever was on at the moment I sat down based on surfing what was on at that very moment.
I can’t explain either one. But then I’m utterly lost by most human behavior, most especially my own.
I think it’s well worth $5. Maybe even $10?!
The Germany DLC’s on sale on steam, so thought I’d start playing this again. I agree it’s well worth a few bucks: part careful planning, part hectic troubleshooting when everything goes wrong.
Mine are:
Europe: 200,960
USA: 504,950
Russia: 362,580
Japan (not China!): 414,920
Wow, nice scores! Sorry about the season 4 name mix up.
Thanks. Some of those… took a few goes.
Didn’t mean to imply I was offended by China confusion. Probably should have added a ;) .
The 2nd game is out now, figured this thread is good enough as it isn’t super popular around here.
I liked the first one enough to pick this up on sale. It’s a pretty good game.
Train Valley 1 was great. And now it’s telling me it’s “Puzzle meets Tycoon”?? Yes please!
Yeah I like that, it gives maps more purpose!
I fired this up again to pick up some of the challenges I missed and now I’m hooked again. Some of the challenges are a little tricky - like no pausing trains.
I’ve probably played Train Valley 2 for about 15 hours now. It actually plays pretty differently, even though it shares much with its older sibling.
First off, it has 50 scenarios to play each with 5 starts to be earned. 3 of the stars are time based - i.e. meet the objectives by 12 minutes, 15 minutes, 21 minutes. The slowest one has been pretty easy to get as I haven’t failed after 15 scenarios. The fastest one can be quite a challenge. Usually I need to play it through once to get an idea where and when to build, earning 2-4 stars. Then I replay to get all 5, sometimes taking several tries. You don’t need all 5 to move on, but once you get all 5 it shows your position on a global leaderboard for how fast you finished the scenario, ending money, amount of time paused. You can build while paused.
As I said, 3 stars are time based. The other 2 throw a monkey wrench by stating such things as, ‘no destroying tracks’, or ‘can’t manually stop the trains’. That can really change how you play.
So in the first Train Valley, the stations were color coded. An icon would pop up showing passengers wanted to go from this station to the blue station. These icons would show up at different stations on a timer and you never knew where the next one would want to go. Delivering the passengers was often trying to synchronize the trains path on the tracks to avoid other trains - pause this one here to let the train go by, switch the track to branch to a different track, etc…
Here is an image of Train Valley 2. The towns (with people in the big circle) each of needs.In the image the topmost town wants bricks and glass while the other town wants chairs and wood planks. Well, to make bricks you need to mine clay in the mine by sending people there. Each person will be converted to a clay (requiring some time). Then the clay needs to be transported to the brick factory, along with workers for the brick factory. Then the bricks are brought to the town.
So, in Train Valley 2, you know what needs to go where. You still need to worry about managing train timing and pathing so one isn’t waiting too long, or crashes into another.
Another new feature is that you can upgrade trains (individually). This usually means it can hold an extra car and goes a bit faster. On some maps you may need to build a tunnel or bridge to access a location. Or it may just make getting there more efficient.
So, what do I think? I do like it quite a bit. It’s more complicated juggling these goods to their locations. Meeting all the goals are challenging. It’s easy to send one on its way and forget to switch tracks and realize its going off somewhere unintended, or it’s on a collision course with another train. It can require some planning to build things in the right order so you’re not waiting too long to get some money to build more stuff.
But, I think I prefer the first one just a bit more. Since I played that to death I’m glad I have the second one. It’s good they changed up the formula because I’m not sure I would have wanted more of exactly the same.
Great write up @robc04 , I gotta revisit the first game, I tried it a few times and just kept getting frustrated as I felt the game was too slow. So I sped it up then I seemed to play really bad at a faster speed. :P
Thanks :-)
You can also rush the appearance of trains if you are ready for another one by clicking the icon (upper left I think). It costs money to do so.
You can play faster some of the time, but once it gets rolling it’s hard to keep everything running where they are supposed to go if it gets too fast (for me at least).
It isn’t necessarily a game you want to play for 6 hours straight, but if you don’t want to play something that requires too much of an investment it’s great for that role (I have played it for hours though too).
I must be misremembering the first game, but I thought it had the same star system where some where based on time and other on (sometimes incompatible) challenges?
I don’t think I said that was new to Train Valley 2. I was just describing the game.