Train Valley World

Train Valley World is not as good as the first two games. It does a poor job teaching how to play, it requires a lot of sitting and waiting at max speed to gain funds, the signal mode where trains can crash into each other seems interesting but is more of a chore to play, and the music is grating and awful. Buy the first two if this one seems fun, but avoid this one. It also has the aesthetics of a crappy mobile game, so that's a red flag too.

Train Valley 1 and 2 were puzzle games; Train Valley World is more like a simple Railroad Tycoon game, with some puzzle features. Because it leans into the business aspects of a train game so much, it's difficult not to notice its deficiencies compared to more robust Railroad Tycoon games. The economy is pretty simple, though it does have pleasing production chains, like coal + ore -> steel, steel + fish -> canned fish. Traffic control in a railroad game can be a thorny problem. The original release of Train Valley World gave up on the problem entirely, and simply allowed trains to "ghost" through each other, though this results in delays as one train stops when this happens. This is still the "normal" mode for the game. The problem here is that the game's awfully easy in "normal" mode, with no real challenging decisions. Just connect sources to destinations and build trains, for the most part. The game now has signals. In "Signal" mode, trains will crash if they run into each other, and you have to designate rail blocks with signals. The game's more challenging in Signal mode, but the signals are still pretty rudimentary compared to many more sophisticated rail games. …

At first I thought the tutorial was broken, but the truth is worse: the whole game feels like it was held together with tape. Pausing the game already messes things up. If you do the tutorial steps while the game is paused, they often do not register properly. The train spawns somewhere else in the fog and if you unpause the game, you immediately get an invalid path. The same nonsense happens when you build more than one station next to each other - the tutorial acts like it does not count, and the routing logic gets even more confused. Trains end up on the wrong tracks, or they are not sent to the station at all and just fail with "cannot find route." And if you save, quit, and load back in, the tutorial is gone. Train signals do not work the way the tutorial says they should, and trains get stuck constantly for reasons the game never explains. It is also impossible to tell when one train is blocking another on a red light if you have a lot of trains running at once, so the whole thing turns into a traffic jam of silent failures. It gets worse. I had one train crash, and the sound and explosion effects just kept going until the FPS started tanking and I had to force quit the…

Requested refund after first 2 missions. Major issue is the lack of chain signals. For a game that 100% revolves around trains, this should be included.

So sad that the lights are not working properly.

It feels like they don't even understand what made their first two Train Valley games good. Feels like a computer science student thought it would be a fun project to try to rebuild this kind of game. Every single aspect of the game is worse than in Train Valley 2. Not every aspect is terrible. But worse.