Incremental skill trees and trains. This feels like a combo that should have happened earlier, but Trainatic is a unique mash-up of idas. You’ll take charge of a train, initially with a single carriage, to turn each carriage into a turret that can attack natural resources around you and harvest them. The train can be damaged if it rams into resources on the train track, but more likely, you’ll run out of fuel if you can’t keep up with the demand of turning some of your collected resources into fuel. The resources you gain can be spent on the giant skill tree to improve your train, equipment, carriage amount, and capacity limits. So far, so incremental…
What I liked most about Trainatic is that for the first two hours, the game is very hands-on. Maximising your efficiency in clearing resources is key. This means you’ll aim and shoot to prioritise certain resources over others. You can also tweak the train speed, but you’ll need to remember that certain resources only appear after a certain distance is reached in an area. You’ll keep levelling up your equipment and train until it hits a certain top speed, and it’s at that point a boss arrives. The boss is a UFO that you’ll chase down at top speed and then eventually catch up with to win the map. Doing so gives you power cores for a sizeable upgrade, which will help you get a foothold in the next map, where totally new resources are to be found. Trainatic spreads its upgrades across different resources, so you’ll sometimes have to drop back to previous maps to harvest them, as the unlockable automated mine is very slow. It’s quicker to drop back to a previous map, all power, and just harvest resources for a few minutes.
The more you unlock, the more powerful your train becomes, and this is where I found myself too powerful for my own good. From map 3 of 5 onwards, I was so powerful that I didn’t need to do anything. I didn’t aim, fire, adjust train speed, or interact with the game at all. I didn’t need to. Lightning strikes, lasers, missiles, and bombs had taken over and were clearing out most of the screen on autopilot. Aside from shifting the order of my train carriages around to get some nifty damage bonuses, Trainatic turned into a skill tree uplock fest and not an engrossing game as it was earlier. I’m not a fan of this personally, but I know others are, so your mileage will quite literally vary.
My biggest gripe came at the final map – space. After a good 7 hours, I arrived at the space map and was immediately dying on the spot. The extreme jump in damage requirements in the final map is like replaying the entire game again to really get somewhere. The problem is, is that nothing new is added, and most gameplay has been removed through the upgrade system. Frankly, I wasn’t going to waste my time. I bailed early and didn’t make it to the end of the final stage, and by this point, I didn’t want to either. It’s a shame, as the longer I played Trainatic, the less I liked it. I do think incremental fans will have a great time early on. It just might be too much of a grind for even the most dedicated incrementalists out there.
My big takeaway from Trainatic is: don’t remove the player from a decent gameplay loop. Keep them in play, even if it is by keeping them busy with something else. If I’m going to spend time in games, I want to enjoy and be an active part of the world I’m in. Trainatic sidelined me, and I didn’t quite recover.
A review code for Trainatic was provided by the developer. Trainatic is out now on Steam.
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