Reply To: To buy or not to buy, that is the question

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#6822
jimutt
Participant

@benze Well my personal opinion is that when a game is released it should already has been going through a period of bug fixing and that all features should be well-tested. I don’t think that just because I’ve got no patience or something like that. And myself I’m not very picky about having to cope with a few bugs as long as it’s not enough to ruin my gameplay experience. No, I’ve played a lot of early access games and also games that have been released before they were really ready. And from that I’ve learned that it’s often very risky. Many games that could have turned out just great didn’t, because of the fact that the developers where not able to make the players happy before they completely lost interest in the game.

By the way I did write that based from what I had read and seen it looked like it was in early Beta. As I said I had not played the game, so I could not give an accurate view on that. That’s why I think you were overreacting a little bit when you asked me which planet I live on 😉

When it comes to whether the game is polished enough for being released it also depends a lot on your personal thoughts and expectations. I also believe that the developers have done a really great job based on how few they are. Though this is a genre where you’ll find many hardcore sim players who want an extensive and complete game. And as this game is called “Train Fever” and announced as a game where you’re supposed to build a train network I believe there are many train-fans here that expect there to be really good functionality for the train system.

As habadacus mentioned the track laying system really isn’t optimal. It’s not easy to upgrade tracks and you can’t upgrade stations. The signals seem to be very limited in some cases. It’s hard to create complex network and getting the behaviour you want. I haven’t tried building very complex tracks yet but based on what I’ve seen and felt this far the signal system could really need some more work. I mean, constructing an overtake track shouldn’t be that hard (perhaps it isn’t, I might just be bad at it). If such things are missing I really understand why people might find the game lacking in features.

Personally I usually like to have as much advanced features in sim games as possible and I like being able to control as many aspects of the game as possible. Because else it’s just an other arcade game. And I believe that attention to detail like animations (you’ll need to find an other game to see them 😉 ) and proper (working) grade crossings also contributes to the general gameplay experience.

Now to my own experience with the game. I have only played for a couple of hours yet, but this far I really like it. The visuals are quite nice (some animations would be nice though 😉 ). Though the farmlands occur pretty flat and I would like some more forest areas. Haven’t really seen a landscape that looks like the one in-game somewhere in the world. But that’s not a very big deal at least. 🙂

The actual gameplay seems pretty good so far, at least I’m enjoying it. I do have to struggle a bit to get along with the track laying system. And the slope tool doesn’t really seem to work very well at all times. Other then that I can’t say very much about it yet. I do think that I’ll continue to play the game for quite a while though, especially if we get some nice updates. 🙂

  • This reply was modified 9 years, 6 months ago by jimutt.