Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Feb 4, 2022

  Train Valley as a simulation of a toy train set, pitched in a puzzle environment with rules, challenges and restrictions. I have never been interested in trains or toy trains owning a toy train set. I am now 41 years old and I am enjoying this game so much that I wonder if this is my midlife crisis. Maybe I will now buy a train set. I am playing through the campaign mode - about halfway through so far. Each level consists of a map with various obstacles and terrain and two or three train stations. As time passes, trains appear in each station with a destination marked on them and every now and again additional stations appear too. Your job is to build the tracks and to control the switches that guide the trains to their destination. When a train reaches its destination you receive income. The quicker the journey, the more you will earn. Switches are automatically added where tracks connect. You may lay track that crosses over other track, destroy previously laid tracks and destroy obstacles, such as trees or buildings. Building tracks and destroying obstacles costs money and as time passes your money decreases under the guise of annual taxes. When trains crash they blow up and damage everything around them. It's quite fun :) You successfully complete a level if you reach the end of the time allowed without going bankrupt - exploding trains are fine, but don't run out of money! There are other challenges for bonus points, such as earning a certain amount in a given level or avoiding trains crashing, things like that. Is it fun? Yes. Not bad. I got this on discount for less than $1 and it's really good value for money. I really feel like I am building a toy train set and guiding trains around. It can be very satisfying optimising routes around the map and watching your toy trains pass within tiny spaces of each other, but not colliding. It has a good feeling about it when you do something clever, probably once or twice per level. This is NOT a transport simulator, it is not an intense puzzle game and it's not a management sim. This IS a fairly simple puzzle game, building tracks and guiding toy trains to their destination. It is not particularly challenging, but not totally casual either. You will have to concentrate and plan and have the restrictions of budget holding you back a little.
• gamedeal user

  May 8, 2015

  Wonderful 'tiny' train management game, which did all things the right way. Got fascinated from the very first second...and forgot time about. :-) You could play step-by-step upgrading levels or just free game. It's kind of an puzzle game to get tracks in best lines. Nevertheless you get wondering how you may send the next train while one, two or more already on the trail. Sometimes it's just a millisecond that saves you from a train-crash, while you keep an eye on your finances. Funny look in best Sid Meier's Railroads tradition, but game is more a puzzle then a railroad simulation. Very funny game for an affordable price.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 17, 2015

  [h1]What is it?[/h1] Train Valley is a casual game where you must lay tracks to connect multiple stations to each other, and route trains without crashes or delays with the goal of sending trains to the correct station marked by a coloured flag. It's not a tycoon or serious transport management sim and there is no cargo or passenger quota to manage. It's more a strategy/puzzle type of game that challenges you to meet a set of goals before time or money run out. [h1]What's to like about it?[/h1] It's silly in a fun way as the difficulty ramps up and you find yourself frantically clicking switches in the hope of avoiding crashes or wrongly-routed trains. Some trains are faster and longer than others and it soon becomes manic. Don't even think of trying a delaying tactic! Keep a train waiting long enough and it will release itself whether you're ready or not! The tutorial is somewhat scant but the game is intuitive to play with a simple interface. You are not automatically thrown out of the game if you suffer a collision (luckily) though your profits take a hit and you'll probably need to do some track repairs. You are given a set of objectives to meet for each location - of increasing difficulty with a greater number of stations to be served. [h1]What's not to like?[/h1] Quite honestly, not much. At first, it feels a bit TOO casual (ie Facebook style) but as the difficulty and number of stations ramp up, the game becomes a real challenge of strategy and timing. The graphics are somewhat muddy and aliased (no in-game options to correct this). Station colours can be a bit obscured by train flags at times when there are a lot of things going on, and a couple of colours are a little too similar which adds unnecessarily to the level of difficulty (for example: the orange and yellow station colours look very similar). These are all minor gripes however, and don't detract from the fun of the game. [h1]In summary...[/h1] Train Valley is no 'Sid Meier' or other type of management or tycoon sim, but it's a fun and addictive little game easily worth its low price. Recommended!
• gamedeal user

  Sep 23, 2015

  A seaming simple yet very addictive little puzzle game, I'd already sunk 10 over hours into this before it left early access. Some of the levels and layouts can be surprisingly challenging, especially if you are trying to complete all the objectives. Fortunately if needed you can play each level as many times as you like completeing 1 objective each time to earn your stamps! The devs seemed to have solved most of the problems with layout, UI, bugs etc before it left early access, so all in all it's a good buy if you're looking for a simple puzzle game to kill an hour or so at a time. Just understand, this is NOT an in depth train simulator, it's a puzzle game with a train theme.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 9, 2016

  Despite the genre listings of "simulation" and "strategy", this is really a puzzle game, not a builder or sim, so if you are, like me, looking for something akin to a Railroad Tycoon game, then you won't find it here. The game itself looks decent, though buggy, it just isn't what it looks like it is on the store page.
• gamedeal user

  Apr 15, 2016

  Ok, let's get over the misconception first: No matter what the dumb user defined tags say, this is not a sim. This is an active puzzle game, that just happens to involve trains. That having been said, it does combine two of my favorite things, trains games and puzzle games. I never thought that I'd somehow have 30 hours in the game, it's something that I just kept on coming back to, having this need to finish all three stamps on all maps, including the DLC. Personally I love the fact that there's a speed function that lets me play fast and just pause when I need to, it makes for a super great challenge (until they put in no pausing as a stamp requirement in the new DLC that made me sad). I personally experienced no crashes of any sort, only in the DLC did I have a bit of a bug where the main menu wouldn't pop up if I hit escape, which was basically just a trifling annoyance. To sum it up: I love finding little unknown games like this which I end up enjoying way more than I ever thought I would, and I'm highly looking forward to future DLC!
• gamedeal user

  May 21, 2016

  I've been looking for something to scratch the Transport / Railroad Tycoon itch for a while now, and although there are some potentially promising games on the horizon, it seemed like there were no good examples in the genre at the moment. And then I stumbled upon Train Valley, which, within a few minutes of playing confirms that the above is true - this isn't a tycoon game. What it is, is a puzzle game - and once you get a few levels in, it's fiendish. It conjurs up the correct mix of raising a smile when things go to plan, and swearing at your screen when you get overwhelmed and the inevitable happens - and trains crash. The premise is simple; you are given a grid and two coloured stations on each map, and you drag lines from one to the other, avoiding or bulldozing (at a cost) your way through buildings and trees, some of which are randomly placed whilst some are always in the same place. Trains will spawn in the stations with a colour indicating that they want you to direct them to the other station, you click to launch the train and it makes its way down the track and you get paid when it arrives - each train has a value which ticks down from the moment it spawns to the moment it arrives at the destination. The complexity comes in as the map progresses. New stations will spawn on the map - in predetermined positions but in a random order, and begin to spawn trains all eager to go somewhere else. You will lay more tracks, launch trains, and use the track switches to try and avoid a catastrophe. Fortunately you can stop and reverse trains, but this doesn't always help if you're not keeping a good watch out - only one train can occupy a station, so it will launch itself if a second one is about to spawn. The difficultly ramps up; early maps serve to teach you the basics and later ones cram stations in awkward places with choke points to force trains onto the same pieces of track. When things go well, it's great - but sometimes, you just can't avoid an explosion. Back to my search for a tycoon game - even though this clearly isn't one, the art style and simple way of laying track would lend itself very well to a more in depth strategy game which, if I were the developer, I'd seriously consider.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 1, 2016

  I don't play tower defence games anymore, because I have this game instead. If you don't see the appeal to tower defence at all, this game is not for you. If you've got the tower defence itch, this game will scratch it until it bleeds. This game doesn't have an undo button, so push your luck too far and it's game over. I know why that would put some people off, but it works for this game. Why is this better than tower defence? In any good tower defence game, getting good at it means learning how the towers work and how each enemy type works. Once you've figured that out, there's not much left to learn or do. With this game, the trains behave the same way (at different speeds) and the track laying rules are intuitive. Will you overpopulate your grid with trains to build up money, or will you play it safer with collissions, but risk facing bankruptcy? Can you time them perfectly so they almost hit but don't? What is the best configuration for the tracks? Is it worth paying extra to demolish your way through a shortcut? These dilemmas you get to face from game 1, without having to remember what does what. There is only one change I would make to this game if I were the developer, and that is this: When the game is paused, I want to still be able to see which trains are going full speed and which trains have only started moving. As a father, I love a game that I can pause and come back to after a nappy change, but I often forget which trains are going full speed and which are not by the time I return.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 12, 2016

  In a way, this is a sort of real-time puzzle game, not unlike Tetris. You lay a finite amount of track, attempt to make the best use of the limited space to deliver the most trains in the shortest time, and revise your track configuration as necessary. The satisfaction of finding the right configuration is hard to describe. Let me put it this way: If you're the type of person who likes optimizing processes, such that an unexpectedly high workload can still be managed with nothing going wrong, you will find much to like in this game. It is a heuristics development and revision game where learning the optimal layout for each situation is half the fun, and the other half is guiding trains through that layout with nothing exploding. Though it usually has little bearing on gameplay, I should also say that this game uses locations and times from history rarely seen in videogames, especially the DLC.
• [A'A] Wanderer

  Jun 30, 2016

  Good idea, and it's fun when it works. But the game has a few major flaws that makes it incredibly frustrating. There is a timer that appears only when there are 5 seconds left before the next train. If you have anything in that range, there's very little you can do especially when the levels are complex. I've also had tracks explode after a train runs into a mountain, even though the track is green when I place it. Further, I've had objects destroy tracks when they sprout from the ground. I was enjoying the game for a while, but the glitches and train management is just far too frustrating for complex levels. I can't recommend the game until the developer fixes these issues, and revamps some of the track management.