The Switch’s entry in the A-Train series is not for everyone, but if you can overcome its complexity, there is a lot of enjoyment.
A-Train is one of those video game series where I hope to have a more consistent approach to localization. Over the years, things such as niche Japanese RPGs have gotten better when they finally surfaced in English, but this little strategy simulation franchise store is still at best.
A-Train or “Let’s use A-Train” as the actual translation of its Japanese name is basically a business simulation franchise closely related to PC best practices. In fact, it fits this definition so well that Maxis, the pioneer of analog genre, even localized it in the West and published a 1992 work. Since then, many entries have been released, covering every platform you can imagine-Mega Drive, DS and 3DS, three generations of PlayStation, PC and even Xbox 360.
The latest entry, A-Train: All get on the train!tourism Bringing the franchise to Nintendo Switch, but also getting a fully localized Western release from Nintendo itself, this is a good development.
Anyway; you know what such a game will bring. You are assigned to work as the boss of a railway company, and your task is simply to provide railway services, please customers and grow your business. It may be a turning point caused by this environment, because this is Japan’s train management simulation system, thus recreating the intricacies of the Japanese railway system and the way the railway provider interacts with the passengers and local governments there.
This is not a company solely focused on making money, although making money is certainly dominant and determines what you can do at a time. These games are sometimes called city simulations, which are also accurate. When you build your own railway empire, the population centers you serve will directly change due to affordable public transportation. You can use it to play games on the system in interesting ways, such as purchasing land in an area where an impressive railway infrastructure will be built. Once the impact of this infrastructure is maintained, you can sell the land when demand and prices soar.
You can complete all these operations in the sandbox, but the core of A-Train is a series of scenarios. These scenarios are carried out on different maps set at different times in history, their economic composition, and available trains and technical meetings. According to the ten years you are in. Each situation has specific and appropriate goals and a fair but challenging difficulty curve. Although you can bend over the sandbox, what A-Train hopes you will do is to solve these situations step by step.
Of course, if simple operations such as building rails, traversing the map, and setting up services are not interesting, then all of these will be useless. Of course, this is the most common problem with this type of game on the controller-but it is a decent job, thanks in large part to the long history of this series of consoles on the console.
The decent button controls allow you to navigate through the menus, and there are some touch screen options, if you are in handheld mode, you can use them to increase speed and access convenience-popular with people because it is definitely a touch screen “handheld type” “Game saves time and effort, and at the same time relaxes from the big screen. The options of the game are surprisingly deep, but unless you want to dig deeper into these details and perform precise scheduling, etc., most of these complexities will be cleverly hidden and automated.
Once you touch it, it will be a lovely and relaxing experience, and I never really felt that I had to fight for the complexity of the game or its control. However, in fact, entering A-Train initially may be a daunting task.
On the suburban map in the middle of the century, you are deeply attracted. Anime consultants in prototype work with clearly matching personality types will try to guide you through the work-but a lot. You will be told what to do, but given enough freedom, even if these tutorial scenes are friendly, you can easily mess them up and get into trouble.
In the early stages, I felt that I had lost patience several times and I was getting closer to the beginning of the game. The overall performance of A-Train is pretty good, even if not very good-there are strange and forgivable ics everywhere, and the visual effects are the basic conditions for adapting to this performance, but it is a unique artistic style. Please note that many interfaces and presentations can be slow. If you stick to it, you will find shortcuts and tricks to speed everything up, and the more you start to understand, the easier it will be to simply enjoy the details of the carefully crafted simulation.
A-Train: All get on the train! Tourism will not be for everyone. This is not only because it is part of the niche genre, but also because of the way it is structured and the time invested in real and in-depth research on “good stuff”. It will never go off track, but sometimes you want the journey to be faster-not everyone can stick to it. If you can do this-and more transport simulation enthusiasts will do it-here is a hidden gem.
A copy of the game is provided by the publisher.
