Train Station Renovation Preview

Have you ever wanted to fix something broken or renovate something but you do not actually want any of the physical labour associated with said tasks? Well, Train Station Renovation by Live Motion Games will really scratch that itch for you. A single player first-person simulator game where I took on the role where I took on a role at a train line company and had to go to each station to not only clean up everything but renovate the entire station before opening it to the public.

Train Station Renovation gives me multiple labour intensive tasks and various tools to do things such as wash off graffiti from walls, collect trash, remove cobwebs, restore broken walls and paint them, repair railways, dismantle broken furniture and replace it with a new one, and so much more. I also am tasked with adding in a minimum number of furnitures or decorations in each section of the station.

Excluding the tutorial, Train Station Renovation has 10 different stations for me to clean and renovate. After completing all 10 stations, I am able to unlock the “sandbox mode” which allows me to revisit each station with unlimited funding to add as many cosmetics to the stations as I want to. The stations can vary in sizes and are each unique from one another. In some stations, I have to move a train in order to successfully 100% complete that station. Every station also has an unique set of tasks that must be completed before you can leave. However, completing the tasks will only give you partial completion to the overall renovation for that station. The optional tasks are not exactly laid out for you, meaning you need to use your eyes and spam the scanner in order to see exactly what sort of repairs you need to fix or trash you need to get rid of. I am not the most observant person but I am also a completionist which I must admit, is a dangerous combination in Train Station Renovation. Sometimes I will miss the one piece of trash that needs to be tossed away. This leads to me running around the station for an hour trying to find just what I had missed because my completion meter was stuck at 99%.

To be honest, getting the 100% completion for each station does not seem to gain any advantages except for bragging rights that I will share with just myself and anyone who reads this preview. Oh by the way, I 100% completed the game. I earn more money the higher the star rating is but I never am strapped for cash. If I wanted to, I could buy the most expensive furniture for every section of the station and still have a lot of money left over. Not only that, I feel as though the options for the furniture are very limited. I also could upgrade my tools but unfortunately, I did not find out about this until I had finished the game. I only found out by accident when I was looking around in the starting section of the game and accidentally clicked on one of the tools hanging on the wall.

Graphically, Train Station Renovation is very pleasing. It is not the most graphic intensive game but the graffiti artwork I see are all very well drawn and detailed. There are occasions when I feel as though some of the objects did not look right or are a bunch of recycled images placed on top of one another. I did enjoy the unique settings for each station and some stations even made me laugh when I saw what the theme was. The tools also look pretty well designed.

The music in the game is very relaxing. I thoroughly enjoyed cleaning the stations and repairing equipment to the soundtrack. Not once did I think “Hey, I heard this one already. Is there an option to skip?” It blended well with the game and I actually did forget how long I spent at each station until the end due to me zoning out to the music.

The controls for the game are pretty straightforward. The tutorial does a great job with telling me how to play the game and walking me through all the controls. The only struggle I have is being able to place furniture down properly. I like to line things up perfectly and unfortunately, there is not a gridlike system for me to place anything down so my benches would look a little lopsided from one another or unaligned. The worst are the cubicle stalls for the washrooms as I could not get the doors to match up properly.

Overall Train Station Renovation is a very relaxing and fun game to play. I finished the entire map in about 11 hours. If I am honest, playing this game when I am stressed out about things that are going on in the world actually helps me forget about all that and relax. Train Station Renovation is a lot of fun and hopefully the Live Motion Games will add in more features to this game.