Rail Route

The game has a bit of a steep learning curve especially for the deeper level automation's, however I would absolutely recommend this game to any person interested in strategy or train based games. The visuals and animations are fantastic as well as high quality audio. This sim is very easy to sink hours into with great satisfaction.

Very satisfying, choose your own adventure like puzzle automation game. Make it as hard as you want for yourself, with the more complicated you get, the more satisfying it becomes.

Sometimes crash or UI non-responsive when building large networks.
The game feels like coding with a bad language, with quite limited capabilities and sometimes not very sensible.
It's more like a puzzle than a sandbox.
Won't recommend at full price.

Confusing UI, I was just lost even after the tutorial as I couldn't overhaul the schedule to fix clashing train times. Great game just too confusing for me

So far I'm really liking the mechanics of this game, but I recommend it with a HUGE caveat - it is not an intuitive game. Despite having a well produced tutorial narrator, the game fails to teach you specifically how some of the most important mechanics work. I appreciate this from an experimentation and learning perspective, but in a game where you're trying to keep the trains running on time, I don't want to experiment! I want to dive right into optimization, and the game hides the keys you truly need to optimize and automate your routes.

Sure, you could probably find some youtube videos explaining things, but I also want to figure things out on my own, I just want a little more help/explanation from the game.

Kinda buggy, but still very fun!

If you like to manage things, and do mental gymnastics, this game is for you!

I got stuck a couple of times where the game failed to offer something new it was supposed to offer me (like regional contracts), but i sill find it very fun

🚆 Rail Route – The Addictive Art of Train Traffic Control 🚆

Rail Route turns the stress of managing a railway system into an oddly relaxing and deeply satisfying experience. It’s a mix of puzzle-solving, automation, and strategy, where you start small with a simple track and slowly expand into a sprawling, high-speed network of chaos (or efficiency, if you’re actually good at it).

🏗️ Gameplay: Build, Route, Repeat

The core loop is simple: schedule trains, manage tracks, and keep everything running on time. As you progress, you unlock automation tools, allowing you to optimize routes and streamline operations. What starts as a chill experience quickly becomes a test of your multitasking skills, especially when unexpected delays start to pile up.

⚙️ Difficulty: Easy to Learn, Hard to Master

The game starts off relaxing, but as your network expands, so do the challenges. Managing multiple lines, preventing collisions, and handling delays requires real strategy. The dynamic mode gives you full control over expansion, while the timetable mode challenges you to work within strict scheduling rules—both offer a different kind of brain workout.

🎨 Graphics & Sound: Minimalist but Effective

The clean, blueprint-style visuals are easy to read and fit the game’s vibe perfectly. The ambient soundtrack and soft train sounds add to the immersion, making it a surprisingly soothing experience—even when everything is falling apart.

⚖️ Final Verdict: 8.5/10 – Trains Have Never Been This Addictive

Rail Route is the perfect blend of strategy and relaxation. Whether you want to carefully plan the perfect rail system or just enjoy watching trains zip around, this game delivers. If you love transport sims or logic-based puzzles, it’s an easy recommendation. Just be warned—what starts as “one more track” quickly turns into hours of fine-tuning your perfect railway empire.

A must play for transportation fans! Great visuals and proper game design really makes you *feel* like a train operator

If you like trains and managing the routes, this is for you. If you like a puzzle game kinda thing, this is for you. Fits a nice area of both while still keeping it interesting.

Really neat game, with supprising depth and nuance. Starts as a simple coordinating puzzle game, and as you unlock automation tools shifts more towards planning and building complex transport network, or efficient scheduling and managing timetables.

For me it reminds me of rail network planning and building aspect of oldschool Transport Tycoon Deluxe with TTDPatch, or OpenTTD and scratches the same itch.

It's a bit rough around the edges though, at the start UI was a bit unintuitive for me and some details on the map are difficult to see. Also introduction of more complex automation pieces (that IMO make the game) is very simple and makes it difficult to understand them. You basically have to experiment a lot to understand different pieces, but when you do, the game gets really fun.

Overall, it's very unique and simple rail traffic management game, that distills the most fun for me aspect of much more complex transport sim games.

This game is fun, but not to easy or hard

Really engaging game; I thought I would not be able to fully grasp the various signaling system uses, but the tutorials are excellent, brief explanations of all the various systems and how they fit in together. I especially like the way the game teaches in steps the various means of routing, so that it is not overwhelming, but incremental which allows for absorption of the lesson.
As much as one may want to jump in to the big scenarios right away, I personally recommend against it because it is a steep hill to pull off. Frustration may lead to quitting, and this game is too much of a gem to play, so take the time to understand all the intricacies and you will find soon enough you can handle even the most difficult scenarios.

There are several YouTube videos of gameplay that also helped me to grasp what it takes to juggle the timetables and numbers involved with each map. I recommend watching a few if you ever find yourself 'stuck' or as in my case pissed off like a motherf#$%^& at my progress. 'Master Hellish' and 'Colonel Failure' have excellent videos to watch.

La papota hecha juego. Lo instale y no me movi por 6 horas de la compu y me sali nomas porque eran las 3 de la mañana.

Cocaine in game form. I installed it and didn’t move from my computer for 6 hours, and I only stopped because it was 3 AM.

Great automation game where you mainly solve problems that you created yourself. The game gradually gives you all the instruments to create more intricate networks, with progression depending on how high your total train throughput is.

The story mode can be goofy and distracting sometimes, and in order to properly educate yourself, you must dig deeper in the description of the different relays and signs on your own. Nevertheless, it feels and plays fresh, introducing something new to the genre.

I guess I'm not made for this genre, it looks cool, the game is polished and guides you better than many other automation games, but it feels like work.

I recommend it, if you enjoy rail specific automation games.

As a dispatcher myself, this is a fine game. I'll recommend my old teacher to take a look at it for his students.
I haven't played a whole lot of it but the controls are simple, the music is nice, the narrator made some references only a train dispatcher could get.
I'd say this is a fun game for the ones who are either just interested in this quite niche topic or even people who might wanna pursue the job.

This game is a solid maybe,

A lot of the positive reviews are accurate, it is easy to jump into, hard to really optimize the tracks, its really addictive and satisfying to get a good time schedule and have everything run smoothly after setting it up.

Now why it is negative:
- A lot of de-sync in multiplayer
-Some quality of life stuff that is annoying, for example if your rail has a sensor, sometimes it does not allow you to upgrade your rail to a faster rail, the only way is to delete the part and rebuild it with the faster rail. Or if you delete a rail, it might reset the sensors. Another thing is that if you upgrade the rail to a higher speed rail, it might also reset your sensors. This can get annoying if you have a large rail network and you are upgrading as it would take a lot of time to manually redo all the sensors.

excellent game - big learning curve and can get very complicated.

It's really fun, i can't stop playing.

Poor explanation in time tables, arrival/departure etc.

I really like the idea of this game. But it is too hard to understand how things work and this annoying guy does not help at all. And it is insanely bug riddled. I once rage quit it hitting alt+f4 and since that moment it crashes on start. WTF?

EDIT: I can not comment to the reply, therefore the edit. Thanks for your prompt reaction. A corrupted save file sounds plausible. However, I gave the game another chance and re-installed it. After the re-install the issue was gone and I could load the old save game. So it was probably something else. There was the latest update in between, so maybe this fixed it.

Another thing that is annoying: if you are in a menu, hitting ESC usually means "bring me back where I come from". This games does a lot of other things, like opening the pause menu etc. Depending where I'm at, it's very inconsistent. I'd expect it to always bring me one step backwards towards the game screen and only from there, hitting ESC should open the pause menu.

Unit Analytics gets re enabled every time I start the game despite I disable it. Really?.

Good game. Takes some time

Game is very fun, HOWEVER, once a train is "on" a routed section of track the entire length of the route is designated as occupied, and changes can't be made. This means you can't change a switch a mile down the route if the train has started on the section. If you accidentally sent a train without changing a switch, too bad. This is made worse with the fact that if you want a different train to be able to use those locked switches, you get penalized for a "run through". I had a great first impression until I saw this feature, but I will not be playing it again until either this is changed, or a workshop mod is released that changes it.

Once you get into it and understand how things work then it becomes a good game and a complex game,good for brain training and different maps equals different challenges a good buy and Recommended

As a railway maestro in Rail Route, I've found myself lost in the intricate dance of steel and steam. The game masterfully blends the simplicity of a city builder with the complexity of a logistics puzzle. Each city map is a new canvas, and I'm the artist, painting lines of track that pulse with the lifeblood of commerce and industry. The automation system is pure genius, allowing me to sit back and watch as my network operates like a well-oiled machine. Yet, the challenge is ever-present, keeping me on my toes as I optimize routes and manage resources. For those who love trains, strategy, and a touch of logic puzzles, Rail Route is the ultimate destination. It's a journey that's as rewarding as it is relaxing, and I can't help but whistle a steam-engine tune as I watch my empire expand across the landscape.

Love the game, and the MP (bata) thats comming will be amazing

Epic

good game

I enjoy the game... But it definitely has a steep learning curve, and the way skills are both described and implemented could be improved. I like it but it's definitely a little rough around the edges, and could be better.

Perfect time killer! Have been following progress since early access, almost from beginning. Its very deep, lot of variety, lot of maps. Its not easy first, but tutorials are good and you learn as you play. Devs has been very community friendly from beginning, changed and improved lot of things from players feedback etc.

And whats the best part: there is multiplayer now also! (although on writing this review multiplayer is still on unstable-branch).

i luv it, i luv it, i luv it, oh yes

It's a decent game but I don't like the fact it's a quite a grind to make money and earn upgrade points in endless mode to expand and automate the infrastructure.
You have to manually dispatch a lot and i mean a lot of trains.
But i do like is the fact that the devs are continuously fixing any bugs.

Warning it's adictive

CANT UNDERSTAND TUTORIAL

Love this Sim/patience game. I just keep coming back to it. Best for me is the many Workshop routes, especially the giant Endless ones. Like the fact that you can design your own routes too.

Can't recommend enough.

This is a wonderful game!

When it works, it's very fulfilling and fun as a kind of puzzle simulation. It is not hugely intuitive so YT help is required but that's okay. Unfortunately, as others have noted, it can suddenly stop loading for no apparent reason and you have to leave it for a few weeks until something is sorted. Not ideal when you have spent hours on a map. But not a reason to ignore a good game, just be aware.

Great game if you love a challenge!!

👍

Addicting logistics game with unlockable upgrades that make you want overhaul your entire infrastructure to be more efficient. For fans of factorio, shapez.

Fun to grind!

I like trains

This game is great for an afternoon and testing your IQ to understand the demands of a railway operator.

Nothing intuitive about this game after watching hours of tutorials online and playing for 8 hours i give up!

Very engaging and addictive. It's like a giant puzzle and I love puzzles.

Brilliant game

I'm encountering a very weird bug on Mac. Left clicking doesn't work for most of the functions — I have to double click to make them work. But double clicking cancels out some other functions, such as switching the route switches. This needs to be fixed before I can actually play the game.

too many aspects of this game dont work in particular the routing sensor and its just too unrealistic to be engaging i gave it a shot but dont think ill pick it up again

Very fun game. I whish for a way to adjust the whole timetable without having to manually clicking the different contracts.