Bounty Train Preview

I’d never considered how much I wanted to be a train conductor in 19th century USA. Thankfully, Bounty Train is here to slap me upside the head and give me the dream I never even knew I wanted – shovelling coal on the great eastern railways.

In a lot of ways, Bounty Train reminds me of runaway roguelike hit FTL: Faster Than Light. You take control of a steam engine in the 19th century, and are tasked with travelling between cities in the USA delivering goods for profit, ferrying passengers and completing objectives along a main quest line. Much like FTL, Bounty Train ate away at my evening hours until I had to force myself to close it or risk losing all of my night’s sleep.

Your experience in Bounty Train is split between three distinct sections: the overworld, in which pre-civil war America is laid out to you in all its industrial glory; the hub screen, in which you can explore the cities you visit, upgrade your train and sell goods; and the travel between locations, where you can control your steam engine directly from a top-down viewpoint.

The game’s presentation is colourful and cheery, accompanied by a score that wflits between classic spaghetti western and more imperialistic overtures filled with horns, drums and nationalistic bombast. The game certainly has a lot of personality in this area, and despite character models being rather basic and copy-pasted in places (especially when it comes to the ordinary passenger models), Bounty Train does a great job of transporting you into its setting.

What is a shame is that the top-down section appears only when you engage in combat or in specific quest missions. Controlling the train – via an emergency brake, pressure and fuel gauges and a power lever – is intuitive, fun and at times quite challenging. Similar to FTL, different areas on your train can be manned by your crew: place a man in the driver’s seat and he’ll industriously shovel coal into the engine until either you run out of the resource (depicting via a dwindling pile near the engine) or he’s killed by bandits or Indians. Other crew members can be used to douse fires, protect important cargo from robbers or defend passengers in combat.

Your enemies in combat come in a number of types, depending on your reputation with the various factions that occupy the Eastern seaboard. From roving Native Americans to bandits and even each side in the upcoming civil war – your conductor and his crew will face a number of threats. Positioning your fighters at windows and doors of your train will enable them to fire out at enemies, dealing varying amounts of damage depending on their skillset. Your train can also be upgraded with turrets, armour and other accessories to ensure you make it to your destination.

The city hub is where you will do most of your wheeling and dealing. Aside from contracts, which can be obtained from the town’s mayor, a main source of your income will come from trading goods around the burgeoning USA. Each city has its own supplies, wants and needs and catering to these can be a good way of earning extra game income. This income can then be spent on unlocking new rail routes, paying off bandits and other ne’er-do-wells or upgrading your train with extra carriages. Passengers can also be picked up from these city hub zones – for an upfront fee you can promise to deliver them to their destination. Unlike classic railway lines, though, you’re not obliged to head straight there. How is Joe Smith from Boston to know that to get to Knoxville you don’t have to go through Portland, New York and Chicago first?

The developers have added a main quest line into the game yet, all told, I had more fun flitting between towns and cities gathering extra carriages, supplies and crew than I ever did playing the main storyline. Perhaps in the future, once the game is out of Early Access and the main game is finalised, a sandbox mode could be added. There are a few errors here and there, as can be expected due to the game’s status in Early Access, as well as a few tiny bugs like missing dialogue or enemies running off screen never to return. Bounty Train makes up for these little hiccups, however, with a bucketful of charm liberally poured over almost every facet of the game.

If I may be allowed to return to the FTL comparison for a moment, Bounty Train is a game that fans of the former will take to like a duck to water. My comparison is in no way reductive – with a little bit of spit-polish, perhaps a difficulty tweak here and there, as well as a full release, Bounty Train could be a game that inherits the title from the sci-fi roguelike. A game that will shock you with its depth, customisation and replayability, Bounty Train is a title that grabs a little bit of this genre and a little bit of that genre and bakes a tasty Industrial Age-themed cake out of it. Well worth picking up despite its early stage in development, it can only get better and better.