Train Life: A Railway Simulator Review – Railway Lyrics

In Train Life, you not only manage a train, but also run your own freight and passenger business. The threshold for entering the simulator is lower than that of popular analogues online game from the developer site Friv2Online Games Studio, but there is a whole carriage of railway romance here.

Train Life: A Railway Simulator was nicknamed "ETS on rails" for a reason: before starting the game, you also have to create a company, give it a logo and name, and choose a starting location from where you, as a driver and owner of your own locomotive, will be able to freely explore the tracks, stretched through dozens of European cities.

Hamburg, Berlin, London , Paris, Salzburg - the map in Train Life is quite large-scale and you are free to choose your direction, except that traveling by diesel train without a financial cushion can be somewhat costly, and credit offices have not yet reached this simulator.

In whatever direction your train is moving, you will inevitably pass through the receiving and departing tracks that run through the central city stations that receive mail and passengers.

Meanwhile, near many cities, separate branches have been built with sidings leading to stations serving factories, enterprises for processing or extracting raw materials. Coal mines and quarries, logging and food farms - each of them offers some goods, and needs some resources.

Conventionally, the ways to make a profit in Train Life can be divided into three types: long-term time contracts on someone else's train, short time contracts on your own locomotive, and free delivery of goods or passengers with correspondence, where you will not be limited by a timer.

The latter type of income is the easiest way for a beginner to get rich quickly, while contracts will allow you to explore the area and open new locations without financial losses, and at the same time test your strength in a strict traffic schedule and try unique modes of transport.

In addition, the more you contribute to the development of the city, the more interesting proposals may come from the administration. Your driver, by the way, also develops and receives skill points that can be spent on reducing fuel consumption or fines, increasing the capacity of wagons - the perks here are more for show.

Before starting a career, it is recommended to go through a fairly detailed practical training of several lengthy stages: if in the process you do not start to sleep, then Train Life: A Railway Simulator is your game.

It is very meditative and easy to learn, which is why in-depth mechanics, such as simulating the coordination of train movements or shunting operations at stations, are simply absent. For the same hitch, a separate menu has been prepared, where you get when you reach the mark in the loading area. The system itself puts the cars on the rails and forms the composition, you just have to connect the moving units with a couple of clicks.

We will control the train using the power lever ( controller ) and the pneumatic braking lever (crane). Speed ​​should be picked up gradually so that the train does not start to slip, and at high speed it is recommended to slow down in order to save some amount of fuel.

There is an inverter for reversing, a direction button for choosing a path, and an emergency brake with a flashy name - that's the whole simple basic set, which can be handled either using hotkeys or by directly clicking on the devices with the mouse during the view from the cockpit.

In addition to the main organs, you will find inside the handle of the headlights and turning on the light in the cab, the wiper and radio control button (designed to listen to music, and not information from the attendants and other drivers), toggle switches for opening doors and controlling the hitch, a semaphore, and also by default off the emergency button, the lift button and the air conditioner adjustment.

As far as I understand, the last three were created solely for cosmetic purposes and do not really affect anything. Unless the alarm blares every time your train approaches a station or a dead end, and you need to click on the appropriate button to turn it off.

If it is not difficult to master the piloting of the train even in the field, then for the sake of traffic rules and some nuances, it is still worth looking into the driver's school . There, for example, you will learn that sudden braking has a detrimental effect on the integrity of the train and it will have to be repaired for a tidy sum.

And ignoring speed limiting signs threatens not only with large fines, but also the likelihood that your train will derail on a sharp turn. You will have to keep an eye on the traffic lights so as not to be on the same track as another train and contact the station controllers, requesting permission to board the entrance.

Train Life: A Railway Simulator is to be commended for its graphics, unique stations, and gorgeous, ever-changing scenery. The surrounding world is not static, animated by sounds and movements. To enjoy the game even more pleasantly, the authors took care of the “hide interface” button. True, you cannot bind it to a hot key, as well as change many other controls.

But it’s not a sin to scold developers for the sounds of the trains themselves: in my opinion, it’s unforgivable to create a train simulator in which you don’t hear either the lulling sound of the wheels or the numerous mechanical noises of a multi-ton train. The most important element of the charm of the railway is being lost .

As in ETS, as you get richer, you will be able to purchase new diesel or electric trains of various capacities and purposes, decorate cabins and modify their individual elements, as well as transfer vehicles to your subordinates so that they passively generate income for your enterprise.

There are very few train models in the game, but each one is carefully designed: several purely cargo models, a little more - passenger and station wagons. As part of the scenarios, it will also be possible to test the German Inter City Express.

The main disadvantages of Train Life: A Railway Simulator include details with which the developers decided not to bother. For example, passengers at stations can be counted on the fingers, there is no animation of landing and even opening of doors - the game has quite a lot of little things that have not been worked out for unknown reasons, which in one way or another hit immersiveness.

The main advantage of the simulator, oddly enough, I see just the same lack of deep simulation. For a person who wants to experience childish delight from driving a train rushing along the picturesque edges, but far from the intricacies of the railway craft, it will be easy and pleasant to break into this project, and here he will find something to occupy himself with for tens of hours.