Railways: Train Simulator, a mobile game but on PC?
The history of Train simulator games goes deeper than anyone would predict as it goes back to Southern Belle, released in 1985. Since then, there has been a constant release of train simulators developed by different publishers, Railway Empire, the Railroad Tycoon series, LocoMania, Microsoft Train Simulator, and so many more.
But not too long ago, Mini Metro gave this genre a minimalist look while all the other developers stuck to a more realistic concept. Following the same vein of the highly regarded Mini Metro, Nerd Monkeys, and Infinity Games came the Railways: Train Simulator, a minimalist train simulator that looks great on the eyes. But you might immediately ask whether it’s a game for the PC or only mobile.
Nerd Monkeys was founded in April 2013, and they have been active in the areas of consulting, bizdev, game development, and publishing in the gaming industry. Their first game, Detective Case and Clown Bot, was released in 2014 and was a point-and-click adventure game with a unique art style. The last game released before Railways was Out of Line, a 2D puzzle-platformer adventure game. So it’s not surprising to see them stepping into a puzzle-type simulation with the Railways: Train Simulator.
Having said so, Railways: Train Simulator is a simple to play puzzle game where you have to move trains between routes in order to pick up passengers. Railway: Train Simulator was developed by Nerd Monkeys, a game development studio, and Infinity Games, a mobile game developer. The game was released on 29 March 2023 on PC.
Railways: Train simulator features minimalist and artistic elements that merge into an immersive puzzle experience. Each level brings a new challenge whether it is the change of the track’s flow, brand new obstacles added or simply increasing the speed of the trains.
The levels in Railways: Train Simulator are well designed. However, they do become more challenging later on with you having to not only move the trains onto the correct track but to also contend with non-player moveable objects such as planes, cars, and occasionally another train. On most of the levels you will have at least 3 trains to control and move to the correct line to pick up passengers. Luckily they’re color-coded, making it easier to figure out which train needs to go where.
This may sound extremely easy and quick to do, but that’s far from the truth. Up to a point, it is relatively easy to get the timing right for the puzzles. But as the tracks change and more obstacles are added, ones you cannot control, it becomes much harder to get the timing right to move the trains to their designated tracks.
If your timing is off, it unfortunately means your trains crash and it is game over. You will need to start the level from the beginning. Luckily you will be able to stop the trains for a short amount of time, allowing you to either slow them down so another train can join them on their track or for a train to pass over their track to a different one.
Railways: Train Simulator continues with its minimalistic design with only two game modes to play. “Time Trial” is easy to explain; you need to get a certain amount of passengers within a certain time frame. You will get stars based on how many passengers you have picked up, with obviously 3 stars being the highest amount picked up. The other game mode, “Maximum score”, is more of an infinite time frame to see how many passengers you can get. You have to focus more as the trains seem to pick up speed as the level progresses in this mode.
Railways: Train Simulator takes being one track minded very literal in the sense that it only has one song for background music, making the game feel more tedious and like a time-waster game. The sound effects are spot on with the sounds of the trains but seem lacking when other obstacles are introduced such as the planes.
The visual design is clean and appeals nicely with the use of a cool pastel color palette. The controls, however, seem extremely similar to an android or IOS game. After doing more research, the game has an Android port making it feel like it was simply ported from Android to Windows.
It would be nice if the Railways: Train Simulator had the option to create your own levels and share them with the community. Even a limited co-op mode would make the game a little bit more interesting to play. Railways: Train Simulator had the potential to at least be an interesting time-waster game, but it does unfortunately, become mindless, even more so with its incredibly lacking soundtrack.
Overall, Railways: Train simulator does not feel like a simulator game at all and instead plays like a really simple mobile puzzle game. While each level has different environments and obstacles to throw you off your game, it still only feels like a game that is more suited to be either a Nintendo Switch or Mobile rather than a PC.
