Railway Islands – Puzzle

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1, Online Content Sharing

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Review:

Railway Islands – Puzzle, released in 2021 on PC and ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2023, is a Puzzle game where players rearrange hex-shaped tiles to re-work the train tracks on those tiles to form a contiguous line from a start point to an end point, passing through each level’s checkpoints along the way.

The presentation in this game is simple, but decent, using simple, colorful 3D visuals for its trains, locales, and tiles. It’s nothing impressive, but it works well enough for the game, and it’s joined by a nice relaxed soundtrack and some decent train sounds.

The gameplay here starts simple, but gets surprisingly complex as you go along – you really only need to create a track that hits all the points from A to B, but this becomes increasingly complicated as you have tracks that criss-cross, tracks that switch from one side of a split to the other as your train crosses them, and tracks that change elevation. I found it to be pretty clever how this game manages to do quite a lot with very little, making for some clever puzzle design.

What’s more, you can even expand on that puzzle design by creating your own puzzles, or playing those created by other players. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be many quality tracks available for download when I reviewed this game, but it’s a nice feature all the same.

Unfortunately, there is one major issue here that really hurts the game – the controls. There’s no touchscreen support here, and the gamepad controls are extremely clunky, easily getting snagged as you try to move it across each of the game’s levels, and forcing you to fight it. What’s more, the menus are also clunky, with the downloadable puzzles being particularly obstinate in not wanting to load when you select them for some reason.

If it wasn’t for the busted controls and buggy menus, I would likely see this as a solid budget Puzzle game. Unfortunately, with these problems you have to have a fair amount of patience to play this game, and that’s a shame, because there’s a lot to like here, and with a little more work this could have been a better game overall.

tl;dr – Railway Islands – Puzzle has players rearranging hex-shaped tiles to create a contiguous train track to ensure a train hits all of its stops. There’s some really good puzzle design here, and even a nice feature to create and share your own puzzles. Unfortunately, this game suffers from some frustrating control issues and clunky menus. As a result, what could have been a great budget Puzzle game ends up only being a decent one.

Grade: C+

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