You can build a straight track with a single train, for example, but a more efficient use of your time and energy is probably to create a circuit or loop with trains travelling around. At its core, the game is about moving materials from Point A to Point B and potentially on to Point C, but there are countless ways to accomplish that. Many of the stages are simple enough that you can complete them with very basic setups, but experimenting can reveal some fun circuits and settings that can boost efficiency. That freedom is where the game really shines. There is some necessary handholding during these stages but it soon opens up and allows players the freedom to play however they want. Early levels are focused on introducing mechanics such as how to supply power plants with the materials needed to create energy or how to keep the city's population growing so you have a healthy supply of workers to assign. Each level has a different objective and different resources available to help you complete them. Once you click past the snarky comments from other employees, you are free to tackle your latest assignment from your corporate overlords. The humour is deeply anti-capitalist, with references to how the corporation has absolute control over its workers and is effectively keeping the player hostage until they are allowed to return home to Earth.Ĭaptured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked) What is there is enough to help Railgrade stand out from other railway management sims, at least for several hours. There are small nuggets of interaction with other Nakatani Chemicals employees, but they are mostly there to establish the late-stage capitalist dystopia that the game is set in. The game is light on story, which isn’t a surprise considering the genre. That means setting up increasingly complex railway systems to deliver materials, energy, and goods where they need to go. A recent arrival to the company’s space colony, your role is to manage the resources at sites and make sure everything is running smoothly across the planet. Mastering the careful balancing act of cost versus efficiency is at the heart of Railgarde, which casts players in the role of Administrator for the dubious Nakatani Chemicals corporation. While it doesn’t go as deep into its mechanics as other games in the genre, it manages to be entertaining throughout its lengthy campaign. Railgrade from developer Minakata Dynamics is a great railway management sim game with some fun quirks. They go exactly where you tell them to, yet can still behave in unexpected ways to keep things interesting. Nuking a large problematic hub and redoing it from scratch, and then seeing it work out, gives quite some satisfaction.Īnyway, if you need the game that quantifies your success, OpenTTD is probably not for you.There is something deeply appealing about playing with trains. Even just keeping things flowing without jams on a large crowded network is quite a challenge in itself. Most advanced players thus focus on different things: having lots of (productive) trains on a network, restricting yourself to just trains, achieving 100% transportation rate for all industries of a certain type, transporting cargo from every single industry on the map, having 'perfect flow' (trains never stop or slow down once they're on the mainline), etc. So if you're playing just to maximize profit, you'll have a lousy time. The money making part is actually horribly unbalanced - surviving is hard during the first few years, and making a single wrong decision can bankrupt you, but as the game progresses, money-making becomes ever easier, with better and more economic trains and general economies of scale.
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