Railroads & Catacombs

This game is so poorly balanced, and entirely ruled on RNG. Even when you have a good deck, spent thousands of resources making your character, one bad RNG event can literally kill that character.

All of the costs are stupidly high as well. Oh, you got an injury on a Tier 1 map? It costs more coal to heal you than you can even earn in a Tier 1 map.

I'll be uninstalling and forgetting about this game, until a friend asks and I tell them to fucking not bother.

This game really is Darkest Dungeons weird Cousin in the best way possible.

An excellent, brutal game, reminiscent of Darkest Dungeon in many ways. This game leans heavily on the Darkest Dungeon inspiration but, as that is my favorite game of all time, I think it is a good choice. Combat is dangerous and lethal. A single mistake can lead to death or injury. I'll break down the rest of the review into pros and cons:

Pros
-Amazing art style. Very gritty and similar to Darkest Dungeon. It has that same raw, pulp comic feel and plenty of dark embellishments. The monsters are also highly varied and horrific. The train is very aesthetically appealing.
-Very creative concept and implementation. The train base dynamic is fairly unique and allows for expansion without getting complicated. The text and characters hint at a world with a rich lore.
-Excellent descriptive text, very dark and Lovecraftian.
-The card design dynamic is very fun and allows for a massive amount of variability in character abilities. You can certainly design crappy ones (though deletion mechanics allows you to eliminate them) but you can also design incredibly powerful combos.
-Unlocking new classes through combat is a fun achievement dynamic.

Cons
-I honestly don't have many and, hopefully, they will be addressed in the final game.
-Being able to field only one character at a time makes it hard to level up and gets a bit repetitive. Allowing even two (at least some of the time) would be much more fun.
-A little more story about why you are fighting these monsters and what your end goal is would be good. The descriptive text is excellent and the survival mechanic makes sense, but I'd like to see the monsters/dungeons tied to the narrative a bit more.

Overall, I'm amazed this is in beta and created by a single dev. I've paid much more for supposedly complete games that were far more flawed. I'd highly recommend this game and will also plan to follow any of this dev's future projects (which I hope are many).

TLDR; Good core game, very repetitive fast and some balance issues and no choices or consequences in dungeons really.


I wish there was a neutral rating. I'm going to give this a recommend, because the core of this game has a ton of potential but there is some lacking content to make this a real gem.

Pros

1. The theme of the game is great, from art to the sound design. For a small indie game it really did very well with this. Very much darkest dungeon style, but different enough to not feel like a straight copy.

2. Combat is fast enough (outside of one boss) that it's never really a slog. It's easy to understand what anything does by hovering over the character and reading the descriptions. You only run one character at a time, and a dungeon takes 10-15 minutes per run (outside of one that can be a slog at 25). So you are in a nice game play loop of getting resources, using them upgrade your train (central hub), unlocking new characters, upgrading characters every 10-15 minutes.

3. Deckbuilding aspect is done well, where each character has a pool of cards they can find during a dungeon run, keeping whatever they take. There are card upgrades, card removal, character power level and subclass upgrades that further specialize the deck. So 2 characters of the same class can have different enough play styles that it doesn't feel silly to have 2 guardians, or 2 rageborn. Though it does seem like there is only 2/3 variations per path, but there are enough classes that it feels fine. The only downside is your deck is fairly small (6-8 cards starting), so once you get a few of the cards you like/want you just end up passing on cards. You get card rewards for fights in dungeons, so you easily get 5+ choices per dungeon run and end up ignoring most of them fairly quickly.


Cons

1. Lack of consequences. This isn't really a push your luck style of dungeon exploring, there is a sanity mechanic but it's pretty easy to never have to deal with it. Supplies and wood are plentiful enough that you can easily keep a character sane for an entire dungeon run. So many characters have built in healing that I rarely if ever have to camp to heal up. I find only when I first run a character that has no upgrades or new cards do I need to worry about supplies at all. Afterwards you just stockpile them until you need to level or want to try a new character. This also means it's really just trivial to upgrade characters, so someone dying isn't really a big deal. Also besides the class/character type combination, nothing is unique about a character. It sucks losing some upgrades you found, but getting a new character and leveling them is very easy. Meaning if someone dies, it just costs you a little bit of time. It's very rarely going to be run ending unless it's very early in the game.


2. Lack of choices. There isn't really a map, with the train aspect I thought you'd be traveling and have to fight through a dungeon to unlock a new area as your train advances etc. This has not been the case, you just always have the same selection of dungeons and beat them to unlock more or higher difficulty. There is also so far no events or anything within a dungeon or world map at all. Meaning the gameplay loop is go into a dungeon, get materials, use them to, and repeat. This gets old and you end up
just in a situation where you can over level every character. There is no end of run that I have found so far.

3. Character balance. There is one character the Therapist, that ignores the sanity mechanic. Once you get him, you can just endlessly farm supplies. He breaks a core mechanic of the game and while it was already easy to deal with sanity, he just makes you forget it even exists. He really needs a rebalance, as he just becomes the best farmer you could ask for in this style of game.
On top of this, every character I have tried so far has had some sort of self healing. This means you really don't care about the camping mechanic, since there is no delay punish in fights. You can just fight as long as you need to to heal a character up. Every fight has a condition to end it, and as long as you don't fulfill that fight enemies spawn endlessly. There is too much sustain across the board in characters that does too much. Between cards and upgrades you should be near 100% health at all times. This plays into the lack of consequences. I clear every fight in every dungeon every time. There is no reason not to, my characters can just heal up in the fight. I never have to use supplies outside of early level characters, so I can just endlessly farm.


Conclusion

Overall for the price I can't really complain, why I ended up giving it a recommend. In it's current state you can see the potential and hope the developer can deliver on that and there is probably 6-10 hours of enjoyment right now unless you really like the grind. It is however very close to being a game I'll sink dozens if not hundreds of hours into once there is a bit more to do and some updates. I hope more updates come out and some balancing tweaks. This is a game I'll let sit in my library for months or years and check in again after some major updates.

Pain Train!