Trainz: Classic Cabon City is an ancient game from 2012. It's a whopping 12 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for the typical features of modern gaming PCs, hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on contemporary machines. The game looks and feels dated. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an old game.
This seems to have be lingering on Steam with an inflated price to try profit from abandonware, the price tag on this is eye-watering.
This isn't exactly a full game, either, it's a DLC for Trainz that was released instead as a full product, although it's not clear why. There's no real trains, either, it's just one tram, one city, that's all you get.
There's a lot of problems here, some due to the age, some due to bad design decisions.
The game is very dated, featuring low-polygon "retro" assets, making this look like a barely functional 3D game from the mid 2000s, even though it was released in 2012. Today, in 2024, it's laughably old and busted.
It's apparent that little to no testing for the game was done, at least on modern gaming PCs. In fullscreen, the game doesn't display properly, with the game area drawn only up in the top left corner of the screen. This is caused by the developer not bothering to ensure the game works on resolutions over 1080p, with very high resolution monitors that use DPI scaling for the OS UI.
Because the game area is not drawn correctly, it doesn't map to the mouse pointer properly, so the game itself simply cannot be played. Gamers shouldn't be forced to accept defective products just because developers don't bother with basic testing on PC.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 5 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Trainz: Classic Cabon City is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $20 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again (although I don't think many people played this even when it was new).
For comparison, the $20 asking price for this game could get you games like "Metro Exodus", "Doom Eternal" or "Alien: Isolation". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
