After buying this game in the Steam Sale, I began to wonder if it was worth it, but Dan’s videos told me to try it out. Some people aren’t into virtually driving a train for hours on end. You have to be a certain species of human to enjoy it, like myself. Aka a train enthusiast. And how I wanted to be an Engineer like my Grandfather when I grew up… boy has that life gotten messed up. 😛
Anyway, decided to try it today. It’s worse than I thought. How so? The content is DLC-based. As in, you have to pay for routes; pay extra, to play a game you already paid for. The game, comes with no routes and only three trains, rendering it nearly unplayable. I literally paid, for the shell of a game. I would like to go up to whoever made this game, and shoot the bigwigs and the CEO who came up with this “brilliant” idea to turn the game into a cash cow.
How… how is this even allowed? HOW, DAMNIT!? If the BBB got a whiff of this, this company would be out of business. Yet they’ve been doing this since last year, and no one has done anything to stop it.
And I think it’s the fact the BBB can’t even do anything, because the company is in Europe somewhere. Spelling “Center” as “Centre” ingame, is pretty obvious they aren’t an American company.
The four routes I had gotten with the Steam version, only three show up. I found out later the 4th is an extension of the 3rd DLC. That’s right, I paid for 1 DLC for the price of 2. This reminds me of Trainz and its plethora of DLC routes.
What happened to the days of MSTS, when routes were actually in the game and you didn’t have to pay extra for them? I guess those days are dead, replaced with micro-transactions and greed. It’s what’s ruining gaming.
What’s even more concerning, is user ratings on Mediacritic. Near the bottom, the user ‘drunkenFrog’ says that in the past, this company literally wiped their area of the Steam forums to hide bad reviews, and flagged negative Steam reviews as “abusive” and “off-topic”. They’re covering up their wrong-doing. Seriously… how are they still in business!?!? I’ve dealt with crap companies in the past (aka SCS Software and of course EA), but this far exceeds the incompetence of anything. It’s like dealing with the US Government.
To top it off, some of the scenarios, the routes aren’t included. You have to buy the route, which is more than I paid for the game. *facepalm*
Moving on, the game itself I heard is very, very buggy. Most of the bugs are with scenarios. I ran into a few other bugs, around setting video. Everytime I set a setting, the game tells me it has to completely restart itself. This isn’t necessary, as most games just refresh themselves. And when it does, I have Steam whining at me of not allowing the game to close fully before opening again.
There’s also very limited resolutions in Windowed mode.
I can’t express this enough. Please folks, don’t get this game. You’re wasting your money by doing so, and there are far better train simulators out there. MSTS(Microsoft Train Simulator) for example, even though it’s old.