Douglas

Its a great game. Everything is possible. You learn new things everyday. Huge re-playability, amazing and huge community around it. Also Workshop is available with thousand of mods. This game is really really good. I recomend.

I already saw and played this game long long time ago, and didn't like it. Actually, I didn't understand it. You need a lot of patient to start in this game, as it has huge barriers for newcomers. But I'm glad I was persistent this time, its worth it! So, the game is kind of a CiM 2 on steroids. But don't expect anything like CiM, its a different game. Its more of macro management, more focused on the financial parts. Lets talk about the difficulties first. Always have in mind the game is Japanese, so they do think different from us ("western ppl?"). Anyway, its a different mindset, and you need to take some time to adapt. - No real tutorial, not a big community around it. Hard to find information online. - Most things are not obvious out of the box, so you need to be patient, like how to move the camera etc. Its all configurable, so you need to be patient if things seems weird at first. - The entire game mechanic cannot be discovered in the game. You will need to go online and read. There are documentation out there and forums, but don't expect to Alt + TAB, cry and get an answer. Sit and read! - There are no indication of how many passengers are waiting at a station. You can only see when they board the train. There are no passengers or vehicles in the city, only your vehicles. Its an old game and as all old games its focused on gameplay not graphics. So expect a lot of gameplay features. Challenges I faced: - The game is extremely hard. You can't just play around and be happy (but there is sandbox mode). You have to carefully think about every move. You need to plan and you need to think. Its like in the real world. You cannot have 1 headquarters and make 1 line and be profitable. A company to be profitable need more than 1 route. You have to make scale profit. You will inevitably have losses for long time till you can have a profit. - Camera movements are tricky. I even thought about making a video about it. You can move the camera in many many ways, but not as simple and effective as CiM 2. - Easy route design as CiM ? Forget about it. You will kiss CO feet after this game. You need to program every station, every train, every platform, every intersection. There is a copy/paste tool to make it easier, but in no way its user friendly. For long time I thought: "WHAT? This is absurd. Its really like that?" But then its a Japanese game. Its a different mindset. In a way its quite nice. It allows you to do many things. - There are no signals. Its all down to schedules. First I thought that was a real bad limitation, but then I realised you can actually program everything to be so smooth that signals are unnecessary. Perhaps that is how it works in Japan? You program every train, every departure and arrival time so the train smoothly goes without getting stuck. And this is what motivates me now, cause its challenging. If you miss by 1 minute, you can screw the whole network. What is different from other games and make it very complex and deep: - You have to move construction materials around the city with trucks or freight trains. Nothing is built without it. You cannot make an apartment if construction materials are not available. - You control city transport but you can also buy offices, shops, apartments and get money from them. Like the old RRT2. You can also build them from scratch. - Value of the land dramatically change with development, and so your costs to build in this land. Even lay tracks and roads are more expensive in the city compared to rural areas. - You can build public buildings, such as parks to develop the area. Its like OpenTTD way to make a good for the city when you have more money than you need. - There are airports, harbours, connection to the city outlimits, and possibility to make roads for the city. AI also exist to develop the city. - There is stock market, you can buy and sells shares. You also get dividends and pay taxes. - Very complex financial report. Not that simplistic CiM approach. - There are big projects such as Maglev trains and airports. - Track laying is very flexible. Compared to Train Fever, which is very limited, in A Train 9 its great. You can make several types of intersections, Y sections, crosses, etc. - You can change time speed out of the box. You can make time goes as slow as 1 minute = 1 hour IRL. You can also speed up time about 300x. Yes, that is right, 300 times. No lag, always smooth. The beauty of old games. - Day and night cycle. Very decent graphics.

The game is nicely done. The devs care about details. Of course for a small company there are things missing, but modding is very easy and the community already solved one of the flaws of the game (4 industry chains), you have now 12. - Graphics are great. - Gameplay is good. Laying tracks could be better, but as its complex I don't know how it could improve since it allows a lot of combinations. - UI is good to me. Some people complain of being small. There is already a mod with bigger icons. You can mod yourself, as change the UI icons is as simple as replace an image in the folder of the game. Font, music, everything, simple replace it. The game give a nice environment and atmosphere of the old Locomotion, TTD and RT2. Its worth it for those who like this kind of game.

Ubisoft is the new EA. Screwing players because they don't care. They found lines on the files saying: This is PC only, who cares.... Plus they artificially made the PC port with worst graphics and slower just to improve PS4 and Xbox One. Luckily a modder called The Worse found a way around this. PC offer much better graphics and better performance without any lag, removing Ubisoft **** programming. This is unacceptable. If you don't like PC don't screw the players, simple don't launch a PC version and go burn in hell!