PC
Published by UIG Entertainment
Developed by ARTDINK
The A-Train series has run for many years now
although for those of us outside of Japan it’s difficult to fully
appreciate just how popular it’s been over the last twenty years. The
Train Giant is actually the international release of A-Train 9 which was
released in Japan about two years ago and it’s a release that will be
welcomed with open arms by loyal fans of the series that have had to put
up with some versions of the game being released in Japanese only. It’s
a series that can initially be deceptive. Take a look at a screenshot of
an A-Train game and you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s another game in
the SimCity vein but that would only be partially true. In fact there’s
much more to the A-Train series than meets the eye and in some respects
it’s a more engrossing experience than you might initially suspect.
In The Train Giant you’ll play as the owner
of a rail company but instead of simply looking after the running of the
rail company, you’re concerned with the general development of the city
in which your rail company operates. To a certain degree this makes a
lot of sense because if the city you’re operating in is firing on all
cylinders then it will attract more people and business will boom
allowing your passenger and freight services to make large profits. You
will be laying train stations and train lines (including elevated and
underground train lines) and managing both passenger and freight
services but you’ll also be laying roads and providing bus services as
well as having your trucks ship goods to various areas of your city that
have no access to materials from train stations for one reason or
another. You can also take on grand construction projects and dabble on
the Stock Market buying and selling shares in an attempt to bring in
extra income for your company.
The three main resources in The Train Giant
are money, people and materials. You’ll begin with a different amount of
money for each scenario but regardless of how much you begin with,
you’ll want to make sure you’re turning a profit as quickly as possible.
If you go into the red in The Train Giant it’s game over so running at a
loss should only be a short-term measure whilst your city is finding its
feet. Victory is achieved when you amass 100 trillion yen in each of the
game’s scenarios, although you are given the option to continue to
develop your city when this goal has been achieved. As we’ve already
mentioned, people are attracted by the state of your city so if it’s
developing nicely people will arrive. Materials made in factories are
essentially the building blocks for your city. Most of the buildings in
the game can’t be constructed without the necessary amount of materials
(stations, tracks and material factories are the only buildings you can
build without materials), so getting a steady supply of materials made
and delivered to your warehouses is absolutely essential. In addition to
these three main resources you’ll also need to make sure you’re
providing enough power to your city. Without power your city will be in
the dark at night and this makes it uninviting to the people. Of course
there are many options for generating power ranging from the
environmentally friendly to the pollution producing.
As with any urban development simulation you
have to take care not to be too wasteful, particularly during the early
phase of a city’s development. It’s too easy to build too many
facilities too early and run up expenses that you can’t hope to afford.
It’s a fair bet that early in your city’s development that skyscrapers,
cultural centres and historic buildings for instance are not needed so
you may want to leave these until you’re turning a healthy profit. If
your power stations are generating much more power than you need you’re
going to end up making a big loss so you’ll want to make sure the amount
of power you’re generating is appropriate to your city’s needs. Likewise
you won’t want to have too many passenger trains running to begin with
as they are likely to be mostly empty and that’s going to be
ridiculously expensive. Thankfully you can enable the option to have a
greater degree of control over your transport and you can restrict your
passenger trains to only travelling at certain times, such as running on
weekdays only for instance or simply running at specific times of the
day, allowing you to be more economical.
What I like about The Train Giant is that you
don’t have complete control over how your city develops. AI companies
will purchase your materials and construct their businesses and you’ll
see homes appear on your map when you’ve made the city attractive enough
for people to want to live there. Should you want to sell a business you
can and in return you can purchase businesses that the AI has created,
if you deem them to be profitable enough that is. The ability for the AI
to get involved means you never quite know how the city is going to
develop and that really helps the replay value of the game.
The Train Giant isn’t just simply an
Anglicized version of A-Train 9, although for fans of the A-Train series
that would have been more than good enough. One of the problems I had
with the preview build of the game, and indeed it appears to have been a
problem with previous versions of the A-Train series, is that the game
didn’t do a good job of explaining itself. The Train Giant doesn’t ship
with an interactive tutorial, which is a shame, but care has been taken
to include a manual which does cover the basics and gets you up and
running with the game. A handful of extra scenarios have been thrown in
for good measure too. One of the more interesting of these sees you
becoming the manager of the European Central Bank and it’s your job to
take over the running of a bankrupt Greece and help it recover by
encouraging investment from the Chinese and lucrative trade from other
nations.
A-Train 9, as I mentioned earlier, was
released two years ago and in truth it wouldn’t have been considered
visually splendid then, let alone in 2012. Thankfully however, the game
does look good enough for a city builder especially as for most of the
game time you won’t be zooming in close enough to notice the rather
bland textures on the buildings. One of the benefits of the game not
being too stressful on your graphics card however is that the game
manages to maintain a solid frame rate even when you’re dealing with a
large city. There are basic weather effects here too, including rain,
fog and snow as well as a day and night cycle which can be switched off
if you prefer. There is no speech in the game and all of the
information, such as objectives, financial reports and scenario
information, is given visually, primarily through the use of text and
numbers. As a result the game is absolutely fine for deaf gamers.
The A-Train series has always been a solid and often impressive alternative to SimCity over the years and The Train Giant (aka A-Train 9) is no exception. The tutorial information provided in the manual compensates for the lack of an interactive tutorial in the game and will help those who are unaccustomed to the nuances of the A-Train series. Those who are used to the series will find that not too much has changed and the same core gameplay principles are present here. In short it’s an impressive experience that fans of city building games and games such as Railroad Tycoon will really appreciate and lose many hours to, as you become obsessed with making your railroads and cities as profitable as possible.
