Islands & Trains is a sandbox diorama-like creative toy that lets players create their own tiny landscape and map out a railway that can traverse around it. This is a great creative tool for anyone who enjoys starting new ideas from a fresh canvas. While Islands & Trains may not appeal to those looking for goal-oriented gameplay, I think everyone can marvel at its quaint village aesthetic and cosy vibe.
If you suffer from karanoia (fear of a blank page), then turn away now. Islands & Trains will not be for you. Outside of a couple of pre-built vistas to show players just how far you can push the tools at your disposal, you’ll always start from scratch. This means terraforming the land square by square into cliffs, waterfalls, sand, and water. You don’t need to do this square by square, as you can draw out a scaled-up square and move ground in large blocks, but when it comes to laying down your railroad, you’ll be doing that square by square. If things are flat, this can be as quick and easy as drawing out lines and dropping in bend sections. Things are trickier when you start raising and lowering tracks, as you’ll need to line things up perfectly. On bigger budget titles, the ability to softly highlight disjointed tracks, or to auto-snap, eases the fiddlier moments
As everything in Islands & Trains works in a square grid format, you’ll be locked into certain inclines and turning circles, and so you’ll have to plan accordingly. For tracks, this is often a case of spamming undo and starting a rise or fall earlier. Turns sometimes look like they fit until you realise the grid-based system will often include squares that look blank inside a U-bend or either side of a chicane. Terraforming can help, and whilst it can be frustrating at times, the fact that you have free rein to change everything on screen makes fixing things as easy as it can be. The grid-based placement does rear its head again when it comes to placing down buildings, animals, and sometimes fences. Some items look centred in their plot, and others don’t, so it feels like you should be able to place down items closer together than you think. Sheep look strange when placed in a group, as they look like polka dots. Larger buildings could look more unique if you can place them back-to-back, but often you can’t. It makes the town elements look less natural and more procedural than I’d have liked. I think the reason this stands out is that no people are moving or milling around. Only the train moves, and so with a still town, the boxy placement of items becomes more prominent on screen. Thankfully, smaller decorations like street flags and washing lines of clothes go a fair way to fixing this issue, if you want to put in the design work.
With those mild gripes out of the way, my time with Islands & Trains to date has been a joy. You need to spend more time to get a truly beautiful choo-choo landscape compared to Summerhouse or Townscaper, but that’s because the scope is wider here. There are a few hundred unique landscape and nature items, buildings, railhouses, and rail track pieces, and this is growing with each update. There are also over 20 train designs, which you can colour and attach a few different carriage types to, up to a 12-carriage train. As you can include loops, track switchers, tunnels, spirals around mountains or rocks, and signalling systems, once you’ve got a multi-train set up in place, it is extremely satisfying to just watch it all run on autopilot. Yes, you can take control and “ride” the trains, too, and these make great use of photo mode. Make it rain, or choose from four different environments and seasons at the outset to create different village aesthetics. It all comes together nicely. There’s a lot here for the price, and once you get used to the small, curiosities of the grid (almost cubic) block-based design and placement of everything, you’ll be building creations big and small without much trouble.
Islands & Trains’ ethos is to provide a stress-free experience. That means no timers, no missions, and no passes or fails. As long as you are OK with that and can make your own fun, then Islands & Trains is a game you could spend countless hours on. I have, and will continue to do so. I’d love a more streamlined way to share creations with each other if a sequel or large update were to happen, but my carefully crafted photo mode creations can at least mask my clunky railroad builds and make it look far more professional than I have any right to look! Creative, fun, and easy to pick up after an intensive first 15 minutes of learning everything out of the box. Recommended.
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