Train Valley Review

Ever feel like the games you play are too high-octane? Too exciting? Too exhilarating? Had enough of pulse-pounding space marine battles, 1000bhp supercars, and tactical espionage action? (I'm being facetious here, but I imagine a lot of people ARE sick to death of those anyway) Maybe you need a game that's slower-paced, a game that's perfect to play if you've just had major heart surgery. Relax, and melt into the laid-back, peaceful locomotive world of Train Valley...

That's just what the evil bastards who made this game want you to think. Train Valley is the equivalent of tuning into Songs of Praise or Antiques Roadshow with your family and being blasted with hardcore pornography instead: what you expected to be a peaceful activity just got very, very stressful in the blink of an eye.

Be clear from the beginning that Train Valley is not Railroad Tycoon. It may look like a cute, tranquil little train simulation, but it, in truth, has more in common with something like Flight Control, which was a delightful little arcade-style mobile game where you'd have to direct planes to the right runway while the difficulty would steadily increase, meaning you had to juggle balls and manage more than a few planes at once.

Train Valley is the spiritual successor, and here, you have to negotiate trains between up to four stations on tracks which you build yourself. Sounds simple, but that's just what they want you to believe. It starts off easy: a train's ready in the blue station, and it needs to go to the red one. All you need to do is build a simple track. However, what do you do when trains are ready to leave at both ends? What about when a new station opens for business? Train Valley actually is a complex game of negotiation that can be as delicate as a paper train.

The reason for this is the tricky track-building system. Train Valley becomes a bigger challenge than it should have been because of the very nature of train tracks themselves. In Flight Control, you can direct the incoming planes with ease using your finger, but train tracks are altogether more rigid. You must make sure that if you're going to create a bend in the track, that you do it with a light turn, otherwise the train will crash, explode and take the tracks and possibly other trains with it, so you must plan carefully when putting in turns. This is easier said than done when you have four trains to manage at once, so the challenge of the game really becomes two-fold. First, you have to make sure the way your tracks split off is sensible, and secondly, you must ensure that trains go the right way by using track switches properly – these dictate which way a train will go on a track that splits into two. To go back to the laboured juggling metaphor, you're going to have a lot of balls in the air, making Train Valley an altogether challenging but somewhat stressful puzzle game.

Conversely, the overall design of the game is like an ice-cream sundae topped with diazepam: chilled and calming. The soundtrack relies on very relaxed bluesy instrumentation which is well crafted and brings to mind Railroad Tycoon 3. Of course, the game is still as stressful as a day spent tied to a train track, but the soundtrack is still lovely, and you're likely to remember it through most of the whole game.

Following the arcade aspirations of the gameplay, the graphics take on a very cutesy form, where the trains and locations are super-deformed. Nothing that seriously affects or ties into the gameplay, but at the very least, it looks nice. Of course, if you're not the type to appreciate the puzzle that this game offers, you'll be too angry to appreciate the graphics.

Beyond the core gameplay, there is a little breadth to Train Valley. You have a sandbox mode, which thankfully allows you to get comfortable with building the tracks, and the main mission mode has challenging sub-objectives, such as “deploy additional trains” (shiver) which add real replayability to the game. Not that this game really needs extra content, as the killer hook is the core gameplay itself. That really begs the question, though: why didn't they do it as a mobile game instead?

Train Valley is solid, but it is by no means expansive or deep. It’s an entertaining game, but you won’t be able to shake the feeling that being on PC isn’t doing it full justice. By all means, play it, it’s certainly worth your time, but if such a port arises, get it for the mobile instead.