Railroad Engineer

Edit: Game has had substantial updates and patches so I have rewritten this review. The old review is spoliered out at the bottom. A fun little model train driving game that is definitely worth $10. The campaign consists of a bunch of missions that range from limited resource management to just driving deliveries. The puzzle piece placement of the tracks is simple and fun. Driving the trains is fun too (except when trying to get up the comically steep hills). My biggest gripe is the lack of train automation. Some of the later missions and the freeplay mode will require the player to micromanage quite a few trains at the same time to meet the demands of industries and settlements. There is time pressure to most of the missions and modes since settlements not supplied with their needs will become unhappy and start losing their population. If their population gets too low, the settlement's production will slow down or stop altogether. If you have trouble with multitasking, you may find the game quite difficult or overwhelming at some parts. Something even as simple as a flag dropped on the tracks that stops the first train that hits it would be huge, although I'd like the ability to control trains remotely with a remote similar to the ones some modern model trains have. If you don't have issues with multitasking, I would definitely recommend this game. Old review: [spoiler]Overall on the fence about this one. I had some fun but there are a lot of bugs and QoL issues that are preventing me from giving it a thumbs up. It definitely needs some work to be worth $10. First off, I tried to load an autosave after wrecking a train for the first time. Couldn't figure out which one it was of the 20+ saves that were already in there, despite never saving the game. Turns out none of them were mine and I guess they were test maps left in by the dev (oops). I wiped them all so I know which ones are mine. The 'load the autosave' is actually the button right under load in the load menu and there is only one that overwrites quite frequently. Unfortunately I later lost a whole hour to the frequent autosaves when it saved while I accidentally crashed a train and needed to restart the mission. There really need to be 2 or more that can be loaded instead of just the 1. Lots of building bugs too. [strike]I managed to fill the entire tutorial city with phantom houses. Turns out the placement guides don't go away when you select another house type[/strike] (Fixed). Resources are also removed if you delete the extractor building over them, so be sure of how you place them or be prepared to restart. Also saw some buffers left behind after deleting track, but I was able to work around it easy enough. Multiple locos in a single train are buggy too. All locos in a train consume fuel when you are driving but only the one under direct control provides power. You have to jump into one, put it in cruise control, and then jump into the other in order to make it up hills without a large running start. 2 electric engines are really OP on trains because putting either one into cruise control and backing out of drive mode lets the one not in cruise recharge. You can abuse this to have them run forever by just swapping which engine is in cruise. I could go on about how electric locos are OP and some other strange balancing choices, but I'd flip my review if the old saves were cleaned, there was more than 1 autosave slot, [strike]the housing placement got cleaned up [/strike] (Fixed), resources were not removed when deleting extraction buildings, and multi loco trains actually operated as a single unit. [strike]And a horn/whistle button is added for driving. The lack of one is unforgivable[/strike] (Added).[/spoiler]