Train Valley Console Edition – Review

Flazm Interactive, a studio based in Lithuania, created the puzzle game Train Valley, which features all of the material from the 2015 PC game as well as all of the DLC. This may look like a city-building strategy game with railway management aspects, but it’s actually more similar to the early iOS air traffic control puzzle games.

There isn’t much of a story to speak of, but there are 30 stages in which you’ll start in a different part of the world and build railways to connect new settlements. The communities develop themselves over the course of several years, culminating in the appearance of a railroad station. Trains will begin to come at the station once it has appeared, at which point they will attempt to depart for another station. A train’s intended destination can be easily determined by its desired hue, as each one is uniquely designated.

Your time will be spent in one of five modes to make this possible. The first one allows you to record music. As long as you avoid certain environmental impediments and don’t spend all your money on tracks, you have some leeway in how you play the game. Considering that your starting budget will likely be above $20,000 and individual track sections would likely set you back several thousand dollars, complacency is not a viable strategy. It will, however, cost more to clear the property for construction. It may only cost a thousand dollars to have a tree removed, but if the land also contains a gas station, you may be looking at much higher costs. Your footprints will jiggle and wind a little as you traverse the landscape.

The following setting allows you to modify the junctions. It’s going to be necessary to install branching sections of rail as more and more stations pop up. The direction of these is regulated by a series of connections that may be switched back and forth between two positions. The information is presented clearly and intuitively on the screen.

The next option is to demolish sections of track that were either placed incorrectly or, more commonly, are no longer useful due to the introduction of a new area.

Then there are the broadcasting outlets. To choose a station and release a train when it is secure to do so, this is the means to do it. You can probably just stay here and keep sending out trains if you have everything put out correctly, with all your connections heading in the appropriate direction and no direct collisions looming. If you’ve forgotten to flip a junction or two trains are headed for a collision, the final resort gives you direct control over the trains. Here you’ll be able to halt them, reverse their path and restart them. When you’ve made a mistake in your planning, this comes in handy.

Once you have that sorted out, you can spend the level controlling trains and constructing rails to new stops (and maybe snapping up the three optional objectives that each level has). If you can handle it, you can move on to the next one. And that’s about it.

In theory, the game’s stages take place in many countries, but in practise, that fact is never communicated to the player. Instead, it basically feels like thirty rather samey stages with not much differentiating them other from the occasional mountain in the way or additional pricey infrastructure to dismantle if you want to get your rails functioning smoothly. Ten minutes into a level, trains and stations still appear, so they’re very lengthy overall.

And after some time, I imagine you’ll find it all very monotonous. Once you understand the game’s fundamentals and the optimal approach, there isn’t much left for you to accomplish. There isn’t much to do after that besides revisit the levels in sandbox mode if you’re feeling particularly motivated to waste time, and that’s assuming you can get past the initial difficulty of the game.

It’s too bad, because the game runs fairly smoothly on consoles. There are some clumsy controls, but at least you can halt the action whenever you like. Trains will stop moving and new lines won’t be laid, but you’ll still be able to control the intersections, start and stop trains, and dispatch them from their stations. This skill makes the game a lot more peaceful and enjoyable, as without it the game would be highly hectic, a completely different experience. We can personally speak to this as we, too, initially missed the pause button.

The game is presented visually effectively, with distinct cut-outs and a well-implemented color-coding scheme for different stations. There is never any question as to where a train must go. Unfortunately, the visuals are really basic. You don’t want dynamic lighting and insane effects in a game like this, even though it was a low-budget effort even for 2015. However, we wished there was more variety in the difficulties and trains available. The lack of variety, though, is likely the game’s worst shortcoming.

It’s fine in Train Valley. It’s simple to learn, not too challenging to master, and fun to play for a few hours at a time. Unfortunately, its lack of lifespan isn’t helped by the fact that it doesn’t include any of the new material from the 2018 sequel, Train Valley 2. But if you’re after a puzzler that you can dip in and out of when you’re bored of shooting people in the face, this just about accomplishes the job.