Station to Station Review

Station to Station is an incredibly endearing strategy game with a beautiful art style and a unique feel. It’s an incredibly simple game at heart, having to build train stations and tracks to create resource lines across small islands, yet it does a surprising amount with this concept.

At its core, Station to Station simply asks you to build train stations at set resource points across the map and connect them all together to create transport lines. It gets its depth from a couple of places, mainly in its resource management and challenges. Everything you build in Station to Station costs money, from stations to rails. Each level requires you to connect all of the buildings on the map to their corresponding options, such as connecting wheat fields to flour mills, etc, yet this can be harder than it seems. The game requires you to think about your rail routes, as drastic changes in altitude require an expensive bridge to be built, and money is only earned upon connecting buildings fully. This is tied together with the game's challenges, too: the Fund Challenge requires you to end the stage above a specific amount of money, which often requires you to take advantage of “stack bonus”. The Special Challenge has much more variety, such as building no bridges throughout a whole stage or building over 3000m of rail in total across an entire stage.

Stack bonus is the main way you’ll earn excessive amounts of money; certain buildings, such as Cities and Steelworks, have multiple resource requirements, and adding multiple of these in a single resource line instead of one by one provides you with a stack bonus. Depending on how many resources you connect all at once, you will earn an increasing amount of bonus cash. This, however, is not as easy as it sounds, as oftentimes creating resource lines and particularly keeping out the main location can be incredibly expensive, requiring some illogical and bizarre station placements. The other options to help manage money are cards, items which can be activated and will have an effect on the next purchase. These can be things such as cheaper bridges and rails, yet they are only single-use; therefore, they can be difficult to use well. These two mechanics come together to create a genuinely interesting and still challenging set of levels, allowing for deep complexity for those who want to aim for the best scores and challenges, or if not, a fun challenge to just clear the stages.

Station to Station is also a visual marvel, taking advantage of a voxel art style yet straying away from any stereotypes that can come with it. It uses lighting impeccably, and when combined with the music, it makes for an incredible atmosphere.

Overall, Station to Station is an incredibly fun and endearing puzzle game with an incredible atmosphere. In its current state, it has only 25 levels, which can be completed relatively quickly, yet outside of this, Station to Station is a wonderful game.