Subway Builder

I live in a third world country where internet stability is not good what kind of single player 40 dollars google maps game needed a constant internet connection. ts crazy and yeah i thank the devs for regional pricing so at least i can buy it but damn i cannot even play this game because of the always online requrements i still dont understand the devs replies on other reviews that said it needs connection to "run the simulation" lol i 100% did not believe that lmao its just a graph from point A to point B with search for available subway lines im sure an old hardware can handle it for the "massive map file size" bruh i didn't believe a road and building map is "that" massive also just make the download optional for each city so players didn't have to download everything tl;dr make the game playable offline. not everyone have constant internet connection

I'm one of the idiots who bought this on the developer's website. That was the pitch, straight from them: buy direct for $30, because on Steam it'll be $40. And when we asked for Steam keys, the answer was that Steam doesn't allow keys when the game is cheaper somewhere else. It is now $30 on Steam. Same price. The stated reason we couldn't have keys no longer exists. What did the people who paid first and tested it for 9 months get? Nothing. If you funded the beta, congratulations: you paid full price to be unpaid QA, and your reward is watching it go on sale to everybody else. Now the product. It's a website in a electron coat. Watch the development footage on their own YouTube channel and you can see what this is assembled from. It's a browser app in a wrapper, optimised for nothing, and it shows: crashes come back as JavaScript errors, which is not a phrase you should ever encounter in a $30 simulation game. It is always online. Single-player. A subway builder. Running on census data that changes approximately never. And it will not start without a live connection to their server. This is disclosed in one short sentence buried near the bottom of the store description, where they were entitled to hope you wouldn't look. No connection, no game. Server down, no game. Developer loses interest, no game. You are not buying software here, you are renting access to somebody's hobby project. It crashes. Regularly. This is not launch-week teething; it has been doing this since beta. Updates break existing saves. Spend hours tuning a network, take a patch, lose the network. There is no faster way to make someone stop playing a builder. There is no AI disclosure on this store page. Steam asks developers to declare how AI was used in making their game. Go and watch how this one gets made on their own channel, then come back and read the store page again. I'll leave that there. Raise any of the above on the subreddit and you get silence. And then there's the developer. On his own Twitter account, about the people who had paid him money, he called us as*holes who hate him, said the customers are so annoying, and floated quitting Subway Builder for a while. The screenshots are circulating; they aren't hard to find. His follow-up post on Reddit was titled "whoops". It contained no apology to the customers he had called as*holes. It did, however, end with an edit thanking his "wordsmith, lawyer, baddie girlfriend" for proofreading it. A damage-control post, written to paying customers, that finds room to mention a lawyer. Maybe that's just a sweet thank-you note. I didn't read it that way, and I don't think I'm the only one who noticed which of those three words was doing the work. I'm refunding this. Not because the idea is bad, the idea is the best thing anyone has done with this genre in years. I'm refunding it because it's an unoptimised always-online browser app that eats your saves, sold on a pricing promise that evaporated, by someone who thinks I'm an as*hole for noticing. It deserved a better developer.

This game was vibe coded with Claude, as the devs have no real coding experience. The overall performance of the game is poor. The fact that this game requires constant internet access to play is a joke and should really deter anyone from purchasing this game. I do not have an issue with AI use if it is properly disclosed (which is not the case here). I would not be surprised if they shut the game down in 6 months when they stop making money; causing everyone who purchased the game the inability to access their own property. The developer, Colin (@Colin_d_m) released several tweets degrading paying customers for their opinions on his game while he also expressed his desire to quit this project and move to another game that he is working on.

Broken, buggy, AI coded mess of a game. Look, the game certainly has its charm and has great potential as the concept is great, but it has way too many issues at this point to recommend it to anyone.

Performance is garbage compared to pre-steam. Always on vibe coded slip Electron app. Dev hates the community that bought the game because he got valid criticism. Spend your money on a dev that doesn't actively hate their community.

Literally an electron web-app. It feels like a website, has plenty of javascript errors popping up instead of proper errors. Very poor player experience. This shouldn't cost more than $0.99 for what it is.

Before the Steam launch, several community members on the subreddit were worried and raised the red flag that the game was not ready for the Steam wide release. In the game's current state, I wholeheartedly cannot recommend purchasing it. Buyer beware, the two hours you have are not enough to truly learn all the analytics and mechanics, because you'll be bogged down (opening Google and Reddit) trying to figure out why tracks and trains aren't running correctly. The game is buggy! All on top of poor design choices like single track lines being one way only, thus eliminating the possibility of a single line terminus stations. Tracks only go one way... which isn't realistic. I loved the concept and really wanted to like this game, but it was cumbersome and I ultimately wasn't having fun. Subway Builder is half-baked at best at an absurdly high asking price for what little you get. I got very tired hearing the same background audio restart everytime I zoomed into a station. I bought this game Day 1 because I was so excited after reading articles in fall 2025 about the game. I ignored the community player warnings and got blindsided by the $30 early deal. The real kicker is one of the Dev's thin-skinned disparaging comments about the players and using AI without disclosing on the game. That was the final straw in a slew of problems to request a refund.

I want to like this game, and I do to an extent, the concept is brilliant. In terms of gameplay it gets boring fast as the is nothing to really engage you while you build money to expand the network. The game also requires you to be always online which SUCK since the is no reason for this, i've paid £20 for this, why should I not be able to play this offline?

I got the website version of the game a month or so after release, so I've been playing for a while, between 50-100 hours. The game has improved significantly since the start and i am confident that it will keep improving which is why I am OK giving this a thumbs up review. However, it is also my opinion that the game was not yet ready for a full release, as there are still major issues in the game that MUST be resolved. The biggest issues are the following (in order of importance): 1. Performance: This is the #1 issue that any and all saves that grow large enough will encounter. When playing at 4x speed, which is almost a must when playing Normal Mode, since you need to let the simulation run to generate money, the game can crawl at a snails pace, rendering it almost unplayable. Panning and zooming on the map is also very laggy, and this, for some reason, is also an issue on blank saves. 2. Always Online: This one is really unfortunate, since on its surface the game is entirely single player, and as such should be able to run completely offline, with no dependence on external servers. However, the game does require a near constant internet connection in order to play, and will not let you perform any actions if you do not have a connection. There have been several reasons given by the devs for why the game must be online, but at the end of the day it is not an excuse. A user should always have the option to run their single player games offline, even if that means a larger install size or potentially slower or less accurate simulation. At some point you will not have internet because of outages or traveling/commuting, or the game servers will be down, either temporarily or permanently, and you will be fully ♥♥♥♥ out of luck trying to play the single player game you spent $40 on. The performance issue should definitely be prioritized as it is the most disruptive to game play, but I really hope the devs put some time & effort into finding a way to allow offline play. If you do buy this game, please treat it as a work in progress, rather than a fully finished product. Other than that, as a causal NYC transit enjoyer, I am loving it