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

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.

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

EDIT: This game was vibe coded using Claude AI, buyers beware. The developers need to get their ♥♥♥♥ together. Hope you like getting annoyed and frustrated every time you can't duck your metro line under a road from an elevated position every single time it happens. Maybe if the "Sandbox" mode allowed you to toggle collision on and off I might be more forgiving. Of course I also can't help but call out the price-tag and always online B.S. For a game that's soon to cost $40 USD it's borderline theft, especially for all the technical issues I've seen other players run into. This clearly needed more time in the oven, if the goal was to get it onto steam as soon as possible then perhaps marking this as "Early Access" alongside the website version would make it seem less... scummy. I also don't see why an Offline mode in this single-player game can't be done. If the problem is the "live data" then I'd rather just play with sightly outdated data instead. Either way it being always online essentially leaves it at the mercy of the developers of whether or not the game will even be playable anymore in say 10 years or so, that's what most people are concern with. I had so much hope for this game and perhaps the more time I spend with it some of the more irritating stuff will eventually be ironed out or dissipate. But of course it will never take away from the initial disappointment. I'd refund it if I could but I already played it for over two hours.

I don’t usually write reviews, but this game disappointed me so much that I felt I had to. I was really excited about it, but it’s the most incomplete game I’ve ever played. The developer claims it’s fully released, yet it feels like an early-stage beta. Even at this price, it’s a waste of money—and the icing on the cake is that the game requires a constant internet connection. At this point, there’s nothing left for me to do but request a refund.

Ive been looking forward to the steam release for months and months, but it was stupid to release a game so clunky and not at all ready, because it ends up with a shedload of reviews like this. They set themselves up for failiure. The tutorial covers the basic mechanics of building, leaving anything demand/analytics based for the player to figure out on their own. The game is always online, meaning the most basic operations can just stop working for no apparent reason (I suddenly cant build anything because now the game doesnt know my license key). Saving and loading is totally broken, deleting saves doesnt actually seem to do anything as deleting and starting a fresh in the same city, opens the one i just tried to delete. So many problems Ive come across require me to take a breather to avoid punching my screen, or restarting steam altogether. Plus, i still dont know how demand works, it seems to have no relation to the actual city whatsoever, how in Birmingham map, during peak times, everyone wants to go from one industrial estate to another, and no one wants to go into the city centre, the demand seems completely randomised, is impossible to learn, and has meant i am yet to have a single profitable service as the demand system makes no sense. Its a good, pretty game, with lots of potential, but it falls short in so many areas i have to say its been a huge waste of money and im not impressed.

There isn't a thing that is NOT broken in this game. Crashed 10 minutes into the first launch, performance is terrible, half of the map just does not load, pathfinding is broken, sometimes to literally unplayable state. Keybinds do not work half the time, can not delete saves [on Linux], express stations do not work and this is not even half the problems I faced while playing. I feel like this game is basically in Early Access, but is falsely advertised as Full game. On top of that, it has "always online" DRM, which I don't like and there's no good excuse for it to be this way. Also, forgot to mention, this game is vibecoded in java script [main dev used claude a lot on streams], which rises even more concerns about the quality of this game. I'm NOT happy and I can NOT recommend this game, especially for it's price. UPD: Dev is an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who hates his fans and refuses to acknowledge any criticism. Yikes

I really wished that the negative reviews were not so acturate and that I could work around its flaws. The game simply isnt ready for a release yet, there is a clear lack of tools in the game to properly create train lines that make sense. Changing between 4 tracks and 2 tracks is non existant with both stations and the tracks, trains seem to get stuck for no apparent reason on X changes (where 2 lines meet and then split in oposite directions) stations when they work perfectly fine in other parts of the system. Editing lines once they are operations is impossible to do if you want to expand or upgrage parts of it as you must clear all trains off the line and completely remove the line itself making it really frustrating to work with. The tutorial is non existant, it teaches nothing about where to plan your lines or even how to fix problems you might come across. If you make a mistake it is not possible to find it when the game tells you as it doesnt show you where a train has been stuck nor why. The price tag is simply unacceptable for a game that is so barebones, upwards of $50+ AUD I would expect from big game development studios not from a game that is relativley small. I wouldnt expect this game to be anymore than $15 as people who might be on the edge of buying it would be turned away from the pricetag especially after seeing the reviews. The juttering and jankyness of the camera even before you place you first line is really annoying especially when you are trying to move long distances to connect stations together. It also makes no sense this game requires you to be online, the only reason I could think would be to constantly gather data from the census but wouldnt it just be easier to only update these stats everytime an update comes out? Overall I dont recomend this game to anyone in its current form, it needs serious work before its worth the price tag the devs have put on it, I could accept if this game wasnt fully relased and still in alpha but no one should be charged this amount of money for a game that will have them frustrated within 2 hours due to its jank and lack of tutorial.

Is this game a complete game? Absolutely the ♥♥♥♥ not. Honestly I would call this beta 0.14.14 or something like that. Is this game enjoyable? For me, yes! I have many hours in this game on and off of steam and I've made mods for it and overall I quite like it. I will say, as a disclaimer, that this game basically requires mods since quite a few basic features are missing but added via mods. 0. Mod Installer and Manager (Railyard by the Railyard Team) (really easy to use) 1. Moving tracks after placement (Move-It by IBM11) 2. Finding track discontinuities (Missed Connections by slurry) (this is a major issue otherwise) 3. Seeing the areas around stations where pops will use them (Station Catchment Viewer by muffintime) 4. Map tacks for station planning (Map Markers by roquerodrigo) 5. Most data like line profitability and the like (Advanced Analytics by Steno) 6. Real life train networks as reference (Transit Overlay by BarKuperman) 7. Trains that are not NYC or REM (many options but DanTrains Abridged is the one I made) 8. Induced Demand / ToD (a bit OP right now but Induced Demand by martig 7) 9. Easily seeing track heights (Track Height Visualizer by seanyushoumori) 10. Starting the game paused (Pause On Start by slurry) 11. Like so many cities in many nations added by so many people, there are 135 on Railyard as I write this Yes, that is a lot of mods. As I said, this game is not complete. But the mods make it go from good but extremely frustrating to quite good with only a bit of frustration. Performance needs quite a bit of work but the devs have a test build I've played which makes the performance *much much better*. If you are asking why they didn't delay until that was ready I cannot answer that on their behalf. It also very much is not ready. This game is always online. This is an anti-piracy measure and not required for the game to function, so I would hope that, in the event of the company going under, they would disable the feature. Still, it is annoying as I would argue that they should just check license at launch and maybe every few hours? As opposed to very often. Overall, the main question many people have is: Is it worth the price? Yes, so long as you are aware this is an early access game not labeled as such, and you install many mods. It is still fun which is why I am ultimately giving it Yes. I would probably do 6 ish / 10 if that was an option. With mods it is a 9/10. P.S.: If you are a dev reading this, I've tried to be lenient but I also have to be honest.

While this game has plenty going for it and I will probably still continue to play it, there are multiple issues that mean I cannot in good conscience recomend this game. Even on a decently powerful rig, after building a few lines the perfomance starts to rapidly degrade. Building new lines takes increasing long, opening graphs or panning the map drops the FPS, and editing an existing line is a nightmare. Trying to insert an infil station requires you to either delete the whole line, or adding a crossover and remove some stops, before adding the station and re-adding the stops you removed earlier. With the current performance this is quite a hassel as you spend more time waiting than building. The UI isn't the best either. Related UI elements, such as when you open the analytics view and want to change what mode of transit you want to look at are all in different corners of the screen. There is no UI scalling either, so I have to squint to see anything and the accounting screen is hard to process. Sometimes pop-ups appear that use the inbuilt OS pop-ups, which for a supposedly finished game isn't really acceptable. There are many more issues than this which many other reviews have gone into already such as the requirement for always online. Ultimately, many of my concerns stem from the fact that this game isn't in early access and with a full price of $53.95 AUD, you would expect a fully polished and fun game to play. That is not what you get. For this price, there are plenty of other games to spend your money on for a better experience.