Beautiful game marred by task circles

I like this game more than I expected. I'd classify it as an idle game. You start out with the ability to be more interactive with it, but eventually tasks take about an hour to finish, and I expect that will eventually get longer. If all your trains are busy, you have to wait or use diamonds/gems to speed things up. This is standard for mobile games, so it's not unexpected. However, you can choose to not do all of the longer tasks at once and instead focus on other things like inventory management if you keep a train or two free. This is an absolutely beautiful game with great animations and sounds and they put a lot of detail into making it look great. I don't know if these are stock graphics, but the game looks really really nice. My ONLY complaint about the entire game so far is that the task circles ruin the beauty of the game. I like to zoom all the way in and look a the graphics, watch the trains and other vehicles moving, look at the buildings, etc. The game is eye candy! But the task circles are like litter in a beautiful landscape. The devs did a fabulous job making this game look gorgeous. I'd love to be able to have the task circles (and other floating actionable objects) disappear when fully zoomed in. I look forward to #3 in this series.

Great Game

I have played this game exclusively now for a few years and I am very satisfied with the game play. I am a veteran so I have a very keen competitive spirit. When you enter the competitions it is a push of resilience! Who will cross the track in first place! You can gage another players willingness to pay their way to the finish line by how quickly they get through each stage. When you are evenly matched and everyone wants the 350 coins it gets very intense, I’ve been in some competitions where I dont think the other players slept for hours. The graphics are great, the story lines need a lot of work, the update in Germany was inspiring, but more work within each geographic region should be engineered. I also suggest the trains go on a more realistic route that you can check on. Going around in small circles takes away from the experience. Lastly the game is pretty lacking as far as diversity in the characters. I know it has a good brushing of everyone, but I would love to see more diversity in the characters. Love Love Love the game, see you at the yard! One addition should be in the rewards department it seems to be the same over and over, every once in awhile place a fully powered train for the first place position. Great job team!

A good diversion, for a week

I know some people are very serious about their games. Maybe they are single and jobless, and can devote the majority of their waking hours to gameplay, but that is not me. I like diversions that will interest and engage me for a few minutes to an hour at a time. This is not one of those. For a week. You are given a small village/country and several tasks to build railroads and deliver items to certain places, and the tasks require 1-5 minutes to accomplish. It’s fun to balance the acquisition of raw materials and turn them into cash and/or developed goods and/or larger railroads. There’s an engaging sense of balance with tasks and upgrades and acquisitions, etc. Then, rather suddenly, every task will require an hour to accomplish. This means, you set your 3-6 trains onto a task, and then…do nothing for an hour. This essentially means you will end up playing the game for three minutes at a time, sending your trains on their way, and then closing out. Then you go away and come back when you can, collect your items, send your trains on 3-6 more hour-long tasks, and close out. After a few days of this, I realized, this just isn’t any fun, and it’s not changing, only getting worse. Where's the fun? Where’s the sense of accomplishment? In short, you realize you’re not playing the game any more, but it's playing you. It’s all obligations, and no entertainment.

Genuine 5 star review

The game itself is nothing special, it’s entertaining and all...but the real reason I gave it 5 stars is the business model of the game developers. Most “free” games are pay to win or advance in any reasonable manner. Sure, in this game you can pay to speed up the process but they do it so much better: the diamonds (essentially premium currency), you can pay to get or you can get in other ways throughout the game like rewards for certain benchmarks and other things. Most games give you a bit of the premium currency at the start and none ever after that unless you pay. Not TrainStation2. And ads. I don’t think I ever been more content with ads in a game than I am in TrainStation2. You don’t watch any ads unless you opt to. So many games nowadays bombard you with ads after mere minutes or even seconds of gameplay. TrainStation2 will only play ads if you choose to play an ad for a reward (say, double your regular payment or for premium currency). Never have I watched an unsolicited ad in TrainStation2. I actually end up watching more ads because I’ve chosen to watch them on my own free will rather than being bombarded with them. Once again, the game is ok, but keep up the work on ads and diamonds, and I’ll gladly stand by this review!

Call this game “Try Again Later “

That is because hundreds of times a day you will get the message “Sorry, no Video available, please try again later.” Reading that is by far the activity that I have experienced the most. In this game, you are constantly competing against 19 other people to see who can deliver the most resources with your trains. I was playing regularly for months, and usually finishing in the top three without spending any money. Then I bought a $15 event pack to get extra rewards in an event. I never finished above 5th again, and started getting worse results in every contest. About a month after I made the mistake of spending money, my game was back to normal and I started winning again, almost always finishing in the top 3 again. There are about 2 contests per week. The game is more fun at lower levels. Once you get to level 100, you start having to jump through ridiculous hoops to complete deliveries. Play for a while at low levels, than switch to a better game. Example: I just “won” a two day competition, taking 1st place out of 20 competitors. My prize was 86 elite locomotive parts. It takes 118 elite parts and 642 common parts to upgrade my elite locomotive from level 34 to level 35 out of 60, so that prize was minimal. It was as if the first prize for winning the Boston Marathon was a plastic water bottle. Also, after you have been playing for a while, about 50% of the game that error message.

Developers don’t care

It’s a basic free to play game, expect to make some bit of progress at first and then have extremely long timers later on. The most frustrating part is the drops. I got one and clearly obtained a legendary train on the screen. In fact it was between another yellow legendary and purple train but the one I got was nowhere in my inventory. When I looked I instead was give. A grey common one. After reaching out to the developers they clearly didn’t care and claimed nothing was wrong with this. So if something goes wrong don’t expect any help. I’m sure even if you actually spent money they would be fine with cheating you and giving you something different than what you expected. I’d recommend avoiding if you want to spend any amount of time in a game later on. It’s really not engaging or fun enough to want to keep waiting HOURS to make a small percentage of progress in quests. After receiving a developer response to this review I can see they do indeed still not care. I had presented a possible bug to them and they refuse to believe anything wrong happened. I really don’t care about getting “good” trains since this a free game. But it’s frustrating when the game does not work as expected and the developers refuse to believe that is the case. If they are unwilling to even acknowledge the possibility that the UI does not match up with what might have happened in the networking back-end then they really deserve a low score.

Great game, but riddled with ads, expensive IAP, and bugs

Current review: Latest update frequently crashes while playing a video ad, losing the reward. Not ok. Support suggested reinstall, no change. Also not ok. Past review: I’ve been playing this game for more than a year, and I’d give it 5 stars alone for the highly addictive play. However, every minute of play involves one or more prompts for ads, interrupting game play. Many ads are irrelevant, such as in a language I can’t even read. There are many in-app purchases, some of which alleviate some or all of the ads, but they are all extremely expensive, at least 3-4 times higher than I’m willing to pay (vs other games) and I can only afford 1 or 2 a month, so I’m beholden to ads and significantly reduced odds of winning challenges most of the time. The other thing wrong is, I’m constantly running into nasty bugs that foil game play, like disappearing controls, leaving me stuck in the home city, UI glitches such as overlapping offers, trains that can no longer be dispatched if I accidentally peek at an unpurchased train, and in the most recent update, inaccessible (overlapping) scoreboards, preventing me from accessing my rewards. Many bugs are sometimes fixed within a week or two, only to return with a vengeance in another update. It’s like there is no quality control at all, periodically ruining gameplay. For these reasons, I can only give this game 2 stars. You’ve been warned.

Ok for a couple of months

But I actually was getting tired of it after about a week or so. The “events” kept me interested for awhile, but to do well in them you need to spend some money, which I did…more than I wanted to, but that isn’t the game’s fault. The biggest problem is the waiting. First, you need raw materials. If you have an open dispatcher you send a train to pick some up. That part usually goes fairly quickly, less than 5 minutes. Then, You need to take rhe raw materials and manufacture the goods to ship to the stations. That can take anywhere between 5 minutes to an hour. Then, depending on the goods you need to make, you may need more time to turn those basic goods into finished goods, which can mean another hour. Once your goods are ready to ship, you assign a train to carry them, as long as you have a dispatcher free. If not, you have to wait until one is free. When you finally get your goods on the train to be shipped where they are wanted, it takes an hour for them to get there, and a dispatcher is tied up until that job is done. It doesn’t matter what type of train, or how many cars are full. It takes an hour in most cases. I realized I was spending more time waiting than I was playing, and I was paying for it. How bored was I that I continued to do this for two months! Bored AND stupid. I strongly recommend you spend you time (and money) somewhere else.

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