Railways

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Railways, elsewhere referred to by the longer title Railways – Train Simulator, is not a Simulation game at all, but a family-friendly Arcade-style game released on mobile devices in 2020 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2022 and PC in 2023. This game has you directing traffic and transfers of color-coded trans across multiple railways, aiming to have each train pick up all of their like-colored passengers without colliding with each other.

The presentation in this game is clean, colorful, and visually-appealing in its simplicity, which not only makes for a stylish look, but also does a great job making it perfectly clear which train is which. This is backed by a cheerful upbeat tune with a bit of harmonica, and typical train sounds to keep the game close to its theme.

The gameplay is simple, and we’ve seen this sort of thing numerous times elsewhere, but it is still done well here – each train is assigned a button on your gamepad, and you can tap that button to temporarily halt the train’s movement, or hold it and use the analog stick to transfer the train from one track to another, with the game deciding the course your train will take based on the direction you put. It’s a control setup that works well, but will really challenge the player to multitask and remember which button goes to which train as they try to juggle their trains around to collect each train’s passengers as they pop up near different tracks.

While the gamepad controls work well, this is clearly a game that was designed to use a touchscreen, as even a brief time playing the game in portable mode will make clear – drawing lines from one track to another is instinctive, natural, and makes the gameplay flow much better, making for less of a challenge overall. However, I don’t think this necessarily makes either way of playing the game better or worse, just a bit tougher or easier.

I suppose if I were to look for a complaint with Railways, I could point to the lack of an endless mode, the lack of multiplayer, or the fact that even the small $5 price tag for this game is still $3 more than the version of the game on mobile devices. But on the other hand, the game works perfectly fine in single-player, and the addition of high-definition visuals and gamepad controls may justify the added expense.

Railways may not be treading new ground in its genre, but it’s polished, well-crafted, and what it does, it does very well. Plus, for only $5, it’s hard to find much fault here. There are certainly areas where it could be improved, but overall, this is a solid Arcade-style game well worth picking up if you’re looking to add a fun time-waster to your game library.

tl;dr – Railways is an Arcade-style game where players re-route trains to pick up passengers on different tracks while avoiding collisions. It’s not a particularly original game, but it has a clean, appealing presentation, it’s well-polished, and both the gamepad and touchscreen controls work quite well. There are some missing features I wish the game had, but for only $5, this is a solid time-waster well worth trying out.

Grade: B

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