
Subway Builder is a hyperrealistic transit simulation game. Build a new subway system from the ground up while dealing with real-world constraints and costs. Craft the subway system your city deserves.
Modeled estimate, not a reported figure. How we estimate →
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About

Subway Builder is a hyperrealistic transit simulation game built using live data from US and UK cities.
Real-World Passenger Simulation
Millions of commuters are generated from Census and Redistricter data and simulated using the same pathfinding algorithms you use on your phone. Your job is to design a route network that gets the most people to their destination as fast as possible. Juggle station placement, transfer dynamics, and train frequency to maximize ridership.
In-Depth Analysis
Explore how individual commuters weigh tradeoffs between wait times, transfers, income distribution, delays, and more, to pick their commute. Understand which routes, stations, and trains your commuters take and use that information to optimize your network.
You must also find the right balance between cost and time using this analysis. Too many trains on a line or an overcrowded station may cause delays or disruptions.
Authentic Data
The US and UK census records home and workplace locations. The game generates millions of commuters with homes from that and then uses a distance-based gravity model to assign them all workplaces. They're also assigned times to leave to/from work in a distribution similar to real life.
This decision is then made based on how long each commute method takes, how much it costs, and the value of their time (different commuters can have different incomes).
If they decide to take the subway you can follow their commute (and thousands of others simultaneously) as they get to work. If a train is delayed or cancelled, it will affect their commute and future commuters will take that into account.
College and airport commuters are also simulated and they behave differently since they have different income distributions and commuting times. Federal data is used for college student counts and FAA data for airports.
Current cities in Subway Builder include: Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Honolulu, Houston, Indianapolis, Miami, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St Louis, and Washington in the US. Birmingham, Liverpool, London, Manchester, and Newcastle are cities available in the UK.
Genres
Stats
All-time low is the lowest price we've recorded for this game since we started tracking it.
Languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain, Arabic, Czech, Dutch, Hungarian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean +11 more
Engagement
Hours played at review time, across 97 reviews with recorded playtime.
Reviews
Themes across 97 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
Reviews
Game is not ready for release. The idea is fun and the first five minutes are great, but eventually you start to notice loads of bugs and things that need improvement. The game looks pretty but it's all just bells and whistles. When it comes to the content it's severely lacking and incomplete. Here are some of things that put me off: - No offline support which is weird for a singleplayer game - The blueprint system is unique but incomplete. I have to clear all of my future plans if I want to make one little upgrade somewhere. To make it better, allow the player to organize their plans - Simulation speed is laughably slow, especially if the simulation is being offloaded from my PC to some server. Nobody needs to simulate a game second-by-second - Map pool is very odd. Missing big cities with famous subway systems but has small American cities - No zones yet, which is a pretty important part for a subway system - Stations and tracks are not upgradable, meaning I need to build a whole new station from scratch if I want to change one thing. - The routing system is awful. I need to either go add every station individually every time I make a change or rely on the buggy auto-routing. Looking forward to playing when they re-release the game, since at this rate no one will want to play this.
Yeah gonna go ahead and refund this one. Basically no tutorial, moving the camera around feels laggy even before you've built a single bit of rail, and it's just clearly lacking a ton of polish. And that's all to say nothing about the fact that a they made a single-player sandbox game online-only. "Oh it's so the game isn't too big and it can run faster" yeah right dude
Cons: 1. Game was heavily coded through Claude Code without prior disclosure. 2. Game has performance issues. 3. Game needs to be always online. 4. Lead Dev acts like an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and threatens to stop working on game because of negative feedback. 5. Many obvious features that would help the quality of life of the game are not there. 6. Obvious Bugs (like not being able to load a safe in the same session) 7. Expansive Pros: 1. Game has a fun concept
Waited months to buy on steam instead of the website for cross-device support without licensing issues. Unfortunately, the game is full of bugs, and the two core mechanics, pathfinding and track building, are just not there for the price. If it's not ready for release, don't release it, especially for $40. I wasn't even going to review until I checked the devs twitter for updates: "My fans are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who hate me so ♥♥♥♥ them" "so sick of game dev rn the customers are so annoying"
Do not buy this game for 10 reasons 1. It can't be run locally, and is basically a website 2. The ui, while looking good is extremely unintuitive for a subway building game, (ie manually routing trains backwards and forwards 3. Bugs! train stations constantly decide not to connect and trains cannot route to them 4. and now imagine i had the energy to think of another 7 things
Don't buy. Exceptionally broken game, and it's a vibecoded mess. Even worse, their AI usage isn't disclosed on the Steam page. Shame, really, I was excited for this.
Game is almost purely AI coded and always online. Plus dev goes maks off on twitter like an idiot. Plus almost 30 euros for this ♥♥♥♥ is insane.
this game is the definition of a scam
Im a nimby rails player and have recreated belgium with fully realistic scheduling and speed limits. Map looks cool and the way it calcs (slang for calculates) the ridership is interesting, but thats about it. Nimby rails is much more intricate when it comes to scheduling and building tracks, making it much easier to recreate existing stations and networks than in this game. You just have a few station layouts and you need to make station groups or whatever. and trains in nimby rails are actual sprites instead of a rectangle like in subway builder. Also, it looks like the trains move at 20fps while the game itself is running fine. Its always online and its an electron app.
AI vibecoded and you always have to be on Internet please do not buy this game like I did
Related
Related
Trends
Steam followers (game-group members) tracked daily from when we started recording.
Momentum
Pace estimated from the game's recent review growth (our daily snapshots) at its own sales-per-review ratio — a momentum signal, not booked sales.
Audience
Estimated from the language of this game's reviews — a proxy for where players are, not official Steam demographics.
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