A-Rail: Everything! Travel – Change – ntower

Building games, especially urban planning simulations, have been popular and successful for decades. Cities: Skylines may be the most important and successful representative in the last few years, however it is already more than six years old. A full series of similar games has been around since 1985, coming from Japan and called the A-Rail. The series has been available for a few days now with the latest offshoot: A-Train: All Abroad. Nintendo Switch offers the opportunity to get started while touring and traveling. But can the title be convincing as well?

Early A-Train: Everything Inside! Tourism is only indirectly a metaphor for urban development. Rather, as the name suggests, the focus is on building and managing a train system – above all, as a player you are the head of a railway company. Special attention is paid to tourism. In the first scene (for a total of eight) one of your tasks, for example, is to change the route from a castle to attract more tourists and boost the region. However, to master this situation, you need to allow the population to build a greater number of railroads and buildings, and make a profit if possible.

What I have just described are only scratches on the surface. The game gives you many options, for example when running trains. Should the vehicle be parked at a train station for a minute or an hour? Should it run with fewer passengers at night or not? You also need the money you receive from passengers to finance the running costs and to invest in new routes and trains, but, for example, the sale of land near train stations from freight trains or the sale of various goods. But other options like stock trading will open after a while. With so many options like this, it’s not just a simple construction simulation, it’s almost a small economic simulation.

The complexity of the game naturally requires different exercises for everyone who has no experience so far in the series. The first scenarios serve as an introduction and explain step by step how to be successful as an entrepreneur. You will get support from some of your company employees and other characters. Many conversations will loosen the tutorial, but this post is also one of the reviews of the game. Due to the many possibilities and functions of the game, you will spend more time with the texts at the beginning than the main game.For this slow and difficult start, you need to bring a little more patience and excitement.

As already mentioned you get a total of eight different scenes. If that’s not enough, you can theoretically get enough stuff from other players. Another part of the game is to create your own scene and share it with other creators around the world. From the size of the map to the frequency of the coal or oil, you have a few options when creating it. Once the map is created, you can let your imagination run wild. You can design the whole map with all its rivers, mountains, fields, houses, railroads and more as you imagine. Because you specifically create a scene, you can determine when this scene is completed, for example from a certain spaced-equal point or when the path length is reached. The amount of difficulty for other players is yours. However, if you are looking for new scenes, you may be disappointed. At the time of writing this review, only three different scenes have been uploaded by other players. Due to the low number of players, if almost no one is playing, there is definitely little encouragement to create your own scenes.

But let’s get to the technical side. Although the game offers somewhat larger maps, although you can explore the map for free and with an isometric camera, the graphics would still be great. Some and at the same time muddy textures leave the A-train: all inside! Dorsim is very dated and ancient. In fact, there is a graphics menu in which you can create different settings – you still can not turn the game into a graphic masterpiece. Options such as the range of vision and the level of detail can only be set, which allows the game to be run mostly at low levels without the occasional nonsense. Unfortunately, I had to admit more or less a serious mistake while playing. From one moment to the next, the game world is no longer visible, only the menu can still be called. When I wanted to save, nothing more happened and I had to restart the game. Due to the lost progress, despite having a – acceptably defined – “save automatically” function, it was very annoying. Another thing I would like to mention at this point is the game menu. It will become smarter and nest-built in TV and portable mode. Even after a few hours of play, you still need to get used to it. Finally, a little information: the game can only be played in English, and because of the general, very economical thing, advanced knowledge is required.