Voidtrain

Disappointing, but with little flashes of brilliance that keep you playing. Voidtrain is a survival craft game without the open world that so many games rely on to extend content. It tries to make up for the fact that it's literally on rails with a more directed experience, but it fails to challenge the player in any way. In fact, Voidtrain actually seems like it's afraid to ask the player to take any risks or perform any game mechanics. [b]It's worth mentioning that you don't have to do [i]anything[/i] to complete this game. No building on the train, no upgrading your weapons or armor; you can just drive on rails until you finish the story without taking any actions. You are not required to engage with the game to finish the game. This is not exaggeration, and is a terrible failure.[/b] Moment to moment gameplay in Voidtrain is simple: ride your train while collecting the crap hanging in the void around it. Use the crap to build stuff on your train, so you can harvest crap better. As you get deeper into the game, new crap appears in the void, but you also increase your ability to collect said crap, so it all evens out. You can build some minor automation on your train, cutting down on your need to collect floating items. You can also decorate and expand the train. None of this matters. The game is on rails. Literally. It has no way for you to progress through an area without also progressing the story. Unlike something like [b]Raft[/b], where you have to purposefully set a course for a story-progression island and you need to prepare and upgrade to do so, Voidtrain is a linear series of maps with progression spaced out between them. So it can never, ever hamper you in a way you can't come back from, because there is no option but to move forward. To that end, you can dive the train through everything, basically. Never upgrade, never make yourself new weapons or armor. Just hit every story point and end the game. And Voidtrain is aware of this, because it goes out of its way to give you a super special just-for-the-final-boss weapon that you can't use in any other context, to make sure that someone who's blown through the game can still complete it. Upgrading is unnecessary. Exploration is unnecessary. Building is unnecessary. The game is terrified of putting anything in your way on your path to victory, and it makes the whole game bad. The one place where Voidtrain shows it has something enticing about it, some little flash of inspiration, is with the Rofleemos. Rofleemos are the small, big-eyed creatures you see in all the artwork for the game, and they're excellent. They can't speak, but they're full of incredible amounts of personality. They blink around your train, they mess with each other, if you get them in a group that play ridiculous instruments together; in short, they're awesome. Rofleemos make me wish this game was designed by whoever made them. I wish we got something that quirky and fun. All told, Voidtrain is disappointing. Its on-rails nature was never designed around, and this led to a game that literally can't challenge the player without becoming potentially unwinnable. There's a lot of potential here, but Voidtrain lived up to precisely none of it. P.S.: Go look up a Rofleemo song. You won't regret it.

Finished the main progression (not the storyline, let others tell you about that because), I came here for the train. I love trains. This game doesn't do trains fantastically, but, for a broader audience this is fine. Getting to the train itself from the humble beginning that is a trolley with a "minigame" to push it is funny enough, and then get thrown into five different crafting benches that each require to be powered manually and individually with fuel class items. This is fine, you'd think that this is just Raft in rails, and well, it is, but... The speed in which every train upgrade goes (overall) is "slow", which means that, if like me, you like to collect every single tiny itty bitty piece of loot that you can, just because its there and there's no other passive way of doing it (I'll cover lootcatchers in a second), you'll notice that the further you progress in general, the more dense the loot gets and the less able to keep up with your train you are. The winch helps with getting around but still doesn't allow you to mass-catch loot until the very lategame, and even then, you'll have to fight with the autoaim it gets affected by. About lootcatchers: They are NOT worth the effort. They are annoying at best, inconsistent at worst. Each cycle is one item and one water unit, with the Tesla locomotive (last one), due to the previously mentioned speed increase you'll look at about TWELVE of them, each with their respective water collector (that you'll have to juggle every chunk of minutes earlygame) because god forbid the player has time to do about anything else the game asks from you (clearing mines, playing arena, looting islands, defending from an enemy convoy). The music is fantastic, the graphics are fenomenal, the narrator is... unsure whether he wants to be part of the experience or not? The progression itself is very much forced on you, tutorial wise you are not given options, you WILL experience everything the game has to offer at least once, but you can redo stuff if you like. I kinda don't understand why are there progression levels, it could very easily be a list of things to unlock, but the content drought gets very noticeable lategame where on early for some reason essential stuff (winch) is not a primary focus of the tech tree, but later on you get "QoL" as primary unlocks (locomotive engine upgrades). I want to like it, but it doesn't want to be liked back.

Тут сделали все, чтобы в первые два часа ты не догадался, что это пустышка и не вернул деньги Картинка красивая, музыка норм, идея интересная, рассказчик классный, а вот геймплей)))) Я даже хз, как сказать Суть игры в том, что ты едешь и фармишь ресы хрен пойми сколько времени, чтобы затем получить микрочастичку истории, которая в свою очередь по ощущениям делалась в последний момент из говна и палок И самое тупое, в игре с прокачкой поезда уровне на 14 я понял, что прокачка не делает мою игру интереснее или легче, поэтому я просто вкинул все ресурсы, чтобы добить дизельный двигатель и просто гнал скипая все, потому что было невыносимо скучно

I mean... the story is pretty mid, (except the last act) the graphics are beautiful though, only reason I'd recommend it is for the multiplayer aspect + the cute rofleemos.

Let me start this with, I overall enjoyed this game. I wish there was a "Sort of" review in Steam, but seeing as I can't give a firm yes, I have to hit No. Its hard to talk about what's good and whats bad here, because every Good has a little * for the Exceptions. Base building is cool when you're building out your train and choosing wagon walls and floors and getting your first storage going, But the Decor is a little rough and it doesn't blend in with the rest of the space. Like, I can't place any of the storage chests or items on a table, except for other decor. With how narrow the wagons are, this means either i'm clogging my trains with decor that is fundamentally in the way, Or i just don't bother with it. The Ally pet things they give you are Cute and I loved having them around, But the bonuses they provide are somewhat random and quickly it becomes more of a hassle to get them assigned around to save 10% fuel on smelting. The weapons feel good to shoot and crafting and customizing them is cool, But the UI for understanding the parts in your inventory and storage isn't a full description, sometimes isn't even accurate at all, and it makes trying to figure out what you have and what's an upgrade annoying. I like the games sense of humor mostly, and the story is a somewhat interesting puzzle box with some twists and turns. My problem is less that I couldn't follow the story as i've seen others comment, and more the narration is delivered with odd timing and written like a sophomore theatre major. Lots of purple prose and philosophical pondering interjected between descriptions of what's going on. It makes the story messy, especially when half the narration feels unnecessary. All that said, I did play this for 50 hours. I would say about half that was me paused doing other things, but even at 25 hours, it was worth it on sale. But the last 3 to 4 hours was a slog. I finished unlocking every research and building everything and realized i had gathered way too many materials and had nothing to spend them on. So I just started steamrolling the journey at max speed to get through the story elements, which were at this point starting to annoy me, just so I could say i finished it and didn't quit right before the finish line. I played this entire thing solo, it might be more interesting with friends, it might just be more of a slog. If you can catch it on sale and want a weird base building FPS game, its not terrible, its just also not great enough to be a standout. Solid 6/10

Enjoyed the game, did not quite understand the story.

Not a bad game but very repetitive and short, some of the story was funny and the narrator was a cool thing in the game. Limited customization to your train and no exploring at all really, a few places you could leave the train that were cool but overall i would only recommend this game for kids.

I suspect the developers are going for whimsical but they're delivering incoherent. The beginning is incredibly boring and clunky. The game spends 20 minutes setting up nothing and giving you popups of the most obvious mechanics (usually 3 popups in quick succession). Actions feel purposely slowed down, so they might be trying to push for a more patient relaxed vibe. However they do it by force like having you just stand still as the character figures out the best place on his toolbelt to place the new hammer. I like the idea of "slow down and enjoy the game". I don't like what amounts to constant cut scenes of your character fiddling with the environment. After the intro I have no idea what is happening. Whatever, I'm on a train and nothing from the first 20 minutes appears to be important. But now I'm on a train and the game is painstakingly telling me what each thing does. Yes, I've seen a brake before. Why was the brake not interactive until I did some checklist of stuff? Finally you're moving (although you have no idea why moving is good) and picking stuff up. 10 minutes of just moving and picking stuff up and I'm bored. The mechanics are a bit clunky, the UI is that old style of popping up on you constantly. 80% of the space in UI menus are pointless, like the research tree shows 2 items and asks you to change pages to see more. This thing takes up the whole screen. Art is pretty but it feels like an asset flip that was colored graded for cohesion. I don't have any context for what this stuff is. It seems to be for whimsy and to attract kids but it's just... not for me. The game performs well, no issues or bugs in my short preview. A lot of little things feel like the game is in early access though, like very limited character creation and default sound settings blasting you with music while the narrator barely mumbles below it. The intro story seemed pointless and not in a mysterious way. More of a placeholder way. Moving around the train is clunky with hard transitions when you're close to and approaching the train. You can't just move naturally, you have to learn what the game will let you do. Don't approach the train from too low of an angle or you'll just stop on the tracks! And no there's no jump, so you need to swim back out and swim back in from the proper angle! Then I read other comments that say the beginning is the best part? No thanks. I'll stop at 30 minutes.

absolutely love this game, its visuals are amazing, and s tory is interesting, however the core game boils down to, "get to depot, explore depot, leave deport, get back to deport"... events are not common, would be nice if more things happen like train battles or something, because we get told we will have train wars, but it was like a one and done

VoidTrain is a very weird game. The gameplay loop is fun at the start, but it ends up getting so repetitive and the game doesn't really try to make the main loop better, they have some small things that make it better, but they are not even close to making the game more streamlined. The story is subjective in the way that it will vary on each persons enjoyment of it, but what it will do is interrupt the gameplay in a very annoying way. I found myself just wanting to get past it just to get back to the main loop. Overall I had an enjoyable experience, the thing that really forces me away from replaying this game is the lack of QOL, the progression tends to feel like it only wants you to play with your friends. I played solo the entire way and It really felt like I was constantly just trying to keep up. This ties back to the lack of actual satisfying progress. Towards the end of the game you start to think that the gameplay is finally switching up a little bit, but then It just defaults back to the same exact gameplay loop with just a small difference. Its very disappointing. I liked playing this, but I would only recommend buying this game on a sale. If you like achievement perfection, this is something the game does well.