NIMBY Rails Reviews

Fun game to play out fantasy of having a good rail network in USA

Its a really fun Game to play for Long hours. Building Thought the cities was a difficult task (8.9) out of 10

Very creative game that comes with lots of mods made by the community. There is also multiplayer. There are common good updates to the game as well and bugs are usually fixed fast.

Really awesome concept and well executed. Responsive dev with years of reasonably frequent updates, super super excited for what comes in the future as well!

The best game on the market if you want to build realistic transit networks in real life cities. This is the only game I have played that allows full transcontinental rail lines and local streetcars/busses operating in the same map with no compromises.

You have to be a railfan or RailNerd to really get 'into' this game. I've been playing it for years, since early in the beta and I have a network from Seattle to the Guatemala border north to south and San Francisco to Berlin, Germany west to east. There are a lot of ways you can play this. You can be more realistic, down to scheduling exact departure time, or more fantasy-like and just find out "what works"without your stations either overloading or always being empty. There's no competition (once you pay off your initial loan and provided you're not losing money). This is kind of like Lego, except for trains (everything from trams to High Speed Rail to even airplanes) and you can't really disassemble what you built and start again (though you don't need to). Bit of a steep learning curve, but there's plenty of help out there for the basic functions to get you started.

quite expensive but really fun when you get into it, if you are a fan of trains, this will be a very fun game for you. one problem is that it’s quite difficult to get into because there are no tutorials so i recommend just searching one up on youtube and you will eventually get the hang of it

Cons first, because to me this is a great game: - There are no goals, no structure, no incentive to do anything outside of accomplishing your personal real-world transit fantasy. Now for some that is not a problem, in fact, that's THE selling point of the game, but for me, to be able to keep playing for a long time—and this game is designed to be played for a long time; it's a spreadsheet game with the map of the whole world—it needs to have some sort of milestones to reach, otherwise laying one track in Bangkok is no different than laying another track in New York, after a couple dozen hours. It doesn't need to even be a storyline or a rigid quest list, it just needs to be a large list of achievements so that players can get a sense of progress instead of feeling it's just a couple of repetitive actions of laying tracks and setting up lines over and over. Achievements like "connected 2 cities with more than 10 million people each", "have active service for 500,000 people a day in one city", "maintain 95% riders' satisfaction while serving 100,000 customers per day", or "connect 2 capital cities with over 1,000 km distance", for example. - Another con that also causes the feeling of repetitiveness in the game is that the reward of the game is very simple and linear: just more money, fake number go up. And after playing the game for more than 30-40 hours, you would have more money than you know what to do with. In fact, you can reach the point with connected transit systems in 3-4 cities where the speed of you building new track cannot keep up with the money you can generate, turning the game into infinite money mode that makes the reward meaningless. I think there should be a parallel reward path alongside momentary income, like permits to build in each city or even nation for example, that can be obtained by reaching a certain number of ridership, but can also be bought with money. Think of it as the cities' governments rewarding you with a new contract, or you buying a land permit from them, depends if you build your system as a public service or a private, for-profit company. The income limit also has to be tuned down while the maximum allowed loan should go up, to prevent the infinite money problem but also maintain a good pace of expansion through debt. Because once you build a profitable line, that line will become a passive income source for you forever, and if that income is too high, like right now, you will get to the point of meaningless money faster. Maybe there should even be a progressive tax system to curb the higher end of profit where players start to make too much money for our own good. - A third con is there is no tutorial, especially for advanced systems like detail scheduling. Not a big gripe considering what type of game this is, most players would just look it up on their own anyway, but a negative point nonetheless. - The final con is that UI and UX are a bit clunky at times, especially around the track-laying menu and the scheduling menu. Again, not a big negative, but still a negative. Now to the pros: - Everything else in the game. The fantasy the game allows, the simplistic but charming and functional visuals, the track system that has just enough detail to be interesting but is not bogged down by complicated details, the freedom to build anywhere in the whole world and build anything from street-to-street trams to continental-length rail lines, the optimized passenger demand map and simulation,... It's an almost perfect, massive, top-down, train tycoon game that serves the unique fantasy of certain players, like those who want to replicate the great rail systems of their nations/regions, or those who wish their country actually had a good rail system but instead have to use this as wish fulfillment (hello there Americans :D).

I would like to like this game as its shows promise. BUT after an hour of trying I haven't managed to make a single line work. The Tutorials haven't been written yet and there is no in game help. So I will come back to this but surely a simple text file of HOW TO BUILD YOUR FIRST TRAIN would be standard. Its a very complicated game with a million things to do, but if I cant even get started then why bother. Sorry but I don't have time to spend hours just learning how it works.

I'm a train guy, and this game's concept is amazing, I wanted to love this game. But first off lets figure out if it's a game... ok, it sort of classifies itself as a game, it has budgets and challenges to overcome, it's not _just_ a route designer, but I can understand the stance that this is just a transit simulator. A game like this has 3 pillars, these are the core parts of the game. Track laying, simulation, and growth. But that's about it, it really is just a route designer with a tacked on scoring system, and some major drawbacks that make even rebuilding existing train lines a bit of a challenge. The fact that existing train lines are removed is an interesting choice, but it isn't possible to recreate track in the game without abusing the fact that tunnels and viaducts basically ignore existing roads and waterways. The track laying isn't bad, per se, being able to add control points to the middle of a rail would be a nice touch, and being able to override ground level warnings would be nice too. Real world data is lacking and it would be nice to be able to build existing tracks yourself, the height system is a little silly, having a height scale of -4 and 4 and three types of track feels like it shouldn't have 7 options that you have to then edit by swapping out the track or the height. First off lets actually talk about that point, height, obviously the map source used has no height information on the existing roads, this isn't really the game's fault, but it does make this more like viaduct simulator, everything's a raised station or a subway because you can go over a 6 level "stack interchange" with a level 1 viaduct, and cross any ocean with a depth 1 tunnel. I don't really know how you go about fixing the lack of data, but it is a fundamental issue with using real world data. Speaking of issues with real world data, rail systems are part of a greater network of transportation, the major flaw here is how the "population" data works. As an example making a train stop at an airport in game is basically useless, despite the fact that connecting to the airport connects to every air traveler. At the very least the population of the airport should probably reflect the number of travelers that pass through that airport on average. Similar stories for park and rides and other connections to existing inter-modal hubs. Finally the last pillar of the game that is just plain missing, growth. A big part of these kinds of transit games is that "growth" occurs, connecting a small-ish town with a train station can boost its economy, make commuters more common, and make the immediate area around the train station a sort of community hub. A train station is just a mall with a couple of train platforms, really, and the area around the train station would become very desirable, and dense. Roads would change to accommodate the rails, but then they would change as drivers get replaced with riders. A big selling point of this game is that it allows you to give NIMBYs the middle finger and build it to prove how good of an idea it is, but it's missing the main factor that shows the benefits of actually building it, you really can just prove how profitable a route would be, using the same statistics already used to "prove" that the rail proposals are a bad idea. Real world data shoehorned this as a very basic simulator, which is a pretty common trend with real world data games, they forget that the most basic feature is modifying the world, and show that your modifications have an effect on the world.