A-Train PC Classic

Amazing game... But require some serious commitment to understand it properly. I have been a long fan of the series but rediscovered it only recently. This feel like the right continuation of the A3 and A4. Just know that the "tutorial" last about 12-16 hour. But this is the most clear and clean explanation I've seen on how to play A-Train. So after going thru it. You'll definitively be ready to play any A-Train game!!!

My favorite A-Train game. I love the 2D graphics. This is a PC port of the Nintendo 3DS version of A-Train. To me this is the most pure A-Train game - it retains the soul of A-Train IV. Essentially think of this as a remastered version of A-Train IV, before they split off and made the 3D versions.


Note to Linux players - this game seems to have known compatibility with WINE and other WINE derivatives, so you will likely need to run this natively on Windows.

A Train PC is fun, complex yet but also kind of annoying railroad management game.

I must say I like the game's complexity. It's a bit sketchy for it's $60 asking price but once you play you realize how complex it is. The tutorials are fun and well presented in a manga style. I've seen a lot of railroad management games on a regional scale like openTTD and Railroad tycoon but I really wanted to see one on a city wide rather than a regional scale in a similar vain through building up parts of your town and various neighborhoods and A-Train comes closest to what I actually want in these kinds of games.

Much of this game is building track and developing land. Building up your town and expanding your system is the fun part. It is suprisingly complex with you having to manage pretty much all aspects of the company and even developing real estate around the stations you build. There is a lot to this game. It's not an easy game. You cannot make a profit just anywhere and you really have to collect some development to make the train lines profitable. Managing things like train and station length, knowing where and what to build is fun. Those problem solving aspects are the best part of this game.

The game gradually introduces you to it's mechanics slowly rather than giving you everything to play around with in the beginning. I don't think it's a bad thing. I helps you get aquainted with using each of them but it definitely has it's caveats when sometimes you need a feature that isnt unlocked yet. One example is for instance, there is a way to get more trains and buses in your arsenal by funding various through what the game calls projects. It's the game's research feature. You get this is in the second or third mission.

Now are there problems? Of course there are. If it takes a bit longer than a second to switch between menus it is annoying. All the time and the annoyance builds up over time. I don't care about flashy animations to open up menus. I want to get to the gameplay. One particularly annoying thing is any warning that causes you to pause the game. You get a dialogue box pop up and then you have to wait about a second or two to press the dialogue then you close the dialogue box and fix the problem.

Getting your trains traveling in the wrong direction is a very annoying thing. Getting your trains to travel in the right direction is pretty unintuitive. The game teaches you to just place trains or buses down on the road or track and you have to make sure you build them right or they will go in the wrong direction. Instead the best way to do this is by going into a schedule manager and doing it yourself. Instead of something like a line manager and putting each of your vehicles on the individual lines you must go into this menu for each train. For whatever reason, if your train travels out of the town borders more than once it can randomly show up on the wrong direction. Even if you set a path for your train it might still change the path if it goes out of town. If your collides with another train. You have to go through that dialogue box thing I did earlier (which is about 5 seconds) then you have to remove your train and then place it back and change it's path all over again. There's no button to reverse the direction of the train after it is already in use. It wastes a lot of time going through this process every time you get something wrong or the game's pathfinding screws up.

The UI is a bit obnoxious. Demolishing things is pretty strange. I feel like they could have had all demolition on one button instead of each menu having it's own demolition button. It would definitely save time if you made a mistake. Road building could also be a lot simpler. The wide 4 lane road cannot transition into a two lane road. You can really only build the 2 lane road across the 4 lane road and then have it terminate. You cannot put streetcar lines on bridges. Even if you build the road it just wont let you drag it across a slope or across water. The lack of the ability to place streetcar lines in a variety of places is very disappointing and you can also only build it in the median of the 4 lane road. This severely limits what you can do with streetcars.

Honestly, I like this game but it is definitely not without it's mechanical flaws and terribly unintuitive UI.

Not worth its full price. But if it's on sale it will be a good game to buy. Regretful on paying full.

To enjoy this game it takes a lot of effort and goodwill. The game has an excellent manual and tutorials, so to learn how it works is not that difficult and there is no need to resort to tutorials outside the game or videos on youtube (in fact you won't find anything, the game is largely ignored in the west).

But damn it, the interface sometimes doesn't make sense and it's not practical. The biggest learning barrier is not the simulation of the game itself, but the interface and all the little details that if you don't get it right or forget it because of inexperience, will become frustrating and infuriating. It takes dozens of hours of constant fighting against the game to start getting used to it. I just got used to it quickly (about 5 hours playing while writing this review) because I have experience with the series.

However, once you start to feel comfortable with the interface and no longer get lost in the nightmare that is coordinating trains with schedules instead of signals, you will start to have fun with what is probably the most addictive and satisfying city management ever made.

The game will continue to be infuriating in many aspects (there is nothing more annoying than the lag caused by the "fast foward" that can make you lose an entire day because the game refuses to turn it off), but the simulation is so robust and the logic behind the game so addictive, that you will probably ignore the bad interface and the lack of practicality.

The only game in town for anyone interested in micromanaging miniature Japanese cities and train lines.

Includes an in-depth tutorial to get you started.

Immensely complex and immensely rewarding to play.

I really want to like this game. I really do. The mechanics seem awesome and deep. The problem is the UI. Half my clicks don't seem to register, and whenever I accidentally move the window (the game runs in windowed mode only btw), the game crashes, and there's no autosave. Moreover, English support is pretty spotty and there's some shady stuff around the publisher with regards to the latest A-Train installment.

At least I got it on sale. I'd say don't try it unless you can get it at a discount.

It is the (very) best version of the A-Train. The deepest in mechanics. It is a great train /company/city simulator. But I recommend buying at a discount!

It's amazing a Nintendo DS-remake ported to the PC can be this deep.
There are so much ways to play.
For example, trains or transport in general can make you money in general, but there is much more to be made by investing in real estate, stocks etc.

Pros:
* Very advanced/deep game systems
* Teaches the player accounting
* Fun managing timetables instead of

Cons:
* Lacks a proper manual. It can be very difficult to work out how to do things. You will need to read a guide (which are also scarce)
* Having trains/vehicles park in a garage at night in nearly impossible to manage with anything more than simple situations.
* There is no option to change the movement setup of vehicles based on deadheading / regular service.
* UI is clunky. One of the biggest cons. It's a DS game ..

Neutral:
* Huge timesink / much micromanagement
* Some more detailed financial vehicle performance graphs/tables would be nice
* When returning to the game after having not played for some months, you might want to redo the tutorial campaigns because you forgot how to use the stock market, manage cities or manages industries. Or understand the company's financial report..


Bit pricey, but a great game.

A-Train PC Classic is a real estate development game, disguised as a train game. Yes, you manage trains, but the real strategy is in buying up land, making it valuable, and building condos and offices on top of it to make money. The job of your transit network is to stimulate demand, not to actually turn a profit. Instead, you’ll be buying up all the land in some sleepy suburb, running a train to it, and then selling the land for double the price you bought it. Better yet, you can skip the middleman and do the construction yourself, and be the sole owner of an entire city worth of apartments and movie theaters.

I’ve played many city and transit simulators, but A-Train is the only one that has deepened my understanding of urbanism. Beneath its cute graphics, A-Train has a powerful simulation of how and why cities develop, with a focus on exactly the things that matter: connections, land, and proximity. In SimCity, you are a god, laying down places for your people to grow wherever you like. In A-Train, you’re just the enabler - you build the infrastructure, and you hope it all works out. The city has a life apart from you. People will actually build new buildings and roads, even if you do nothing. But, if you put down a few crucial elements, you can multiply the city’s growth. I feel like urban planners think like A-Train and not SimCity - they are trying to tweak a complicated system towards some goal, with limited powers.

(And if you, as an American or European, ever wondered why public transit agencies in Japan and Singapore are actually profitable, look no further! This game is the answer: they are primarily in the real estate market, and only run trains because it benefits their real estate.)

Besides having one of the most satisfying city-building experiences I’ve seen in a game, the other appeal of A-Train is how charming it is graphically. The isometric graphics might be old school (SimCity 2000!) but the execution is spot-on. The look of your entire city changes with the season and weather. Compare this to the 3D A-Train games made by the same company, and the difference is night and day: the 3D models are clunky and soulless, while this game oozes with personality. Everything is also very Japanese: you’ll have cherry blossoms in the spring, and there are old temples hidden in many of the maps, waiting for some tourists. When I found myself in Osaka last year, I looked out of the window on my train, and was shocked by how much real-life actually looked like this game.

My biggest gripe with this game is obviously cost. $60 for a DS game ported to PC is absurd. The other problem with this game is time commitment - a scenario takes maybe 40 hours to finish if you’re decently good. The game simulates every minute of a year. It would benefit from being perhaps 4x faster. Finally, a lot of systems in the game are poorly explained. I've attempted to write a guide with some tips on how to get started on the game. It can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KhGVELrQFlvOGNyPoNZUKTSt2V6fABa84BWgFYDAaDo/edit?usp=sharing

Feedback is appreciated.

This game is like an improved version of the original A-Train.

A lot more stuff in the game, but I wish they had included the original maps too.

Simply the the most flavorful logistics/economy sim out there. Come for the in-depth economy simulation and timetable management, stay for the slice-of-life office conversations, day/night and season cycle and how generally comfy this game is. At least until it's time to pay your taxes.

Seriously though, this game has a lot to offer over TTD both in terms of presentation and mechanics. It is much more involved with a lot more factors to consider. For this it does trade out some micromanagement on the signals/rail placement side but adds a few layers on the business and management side of things, making it a somewhat more realistic experience where you have to consider the municipalities' long term development plans, rising land value due to your buildup of infrastructure and the possibility of private investors buying said land and filling it with buildings that might later get in the way of your expansion plans unless you are willing to spend millions to buy it off of them and tear their stuff down again.

Overall, if you want a more economy-focused take on something like TTD, this game is probably the best you can get.

I'll give the PC version a very weak recommendation. This is one of the rare cases where I'd pick "neutral" if I could.

I've put hundreds of hours into the Nintendo 3DS version of this game, and was excited to try the PC version. The core gameplay of A-Train Classic is excellent, and I expected that the PC version would be an all-around improvement over the 3DS version, which had to cram an extremely complex simulation into a handheld gaming device with limited CPU power.

It turns out that the PC version feels like a sloppy port of the 3DS game (a sentence I never expected to use in my life). In the PC version, I always feel like I'm fighting with the user interface. There are many different panels and windows you can open, but although you can move most of them around the screen, you can't dock them, so they'll always be obscuring some of the map unless you hide them. I often find that some window is covering up something on the map I need to see, and have to waste time micromanaging the windows. This is particularly problematic on small screens. Worse, certain context windows cannot be moved at all and can really get in the way on small screens. For the windows that you can move around, if you are using the mouse to pan the man and accidentally drag the cursor over a window, it will immediately stop panning the pan and start dragging the window.

Some of the keyboard shortcuts don't work in situations where they should. For example, the keyboard shortcuts to pan the map stop working when you're placing road or track, forcing you to pan by click-and-dragging with the mouse. Since the mouse is also what you're using to place the road/track, this can lead to accidentally placing road/track and then having to undo.

Aside from irritating user interface issues, this is a solid simulation game with the potential to give you many hundreds of hours of playtime. Although it masquerades as a rail simulation, it is in fact a complete city-building simulation with as much depth as any SimCity style game. You can play this game in free-play, but where it really shines are the scenarios which require you to meet certain targets (e.g. build 100km of railways, attain yearly profits of $1 billion) within a fixed period, which add a great puzzle element on top of the city planning and economy gameplay. Certain elements of the gameplay are tedious or not very well designed (particularly managing truck and bus routes), but those are the exception rather than the rule, and any hardcore sim fan should easily be able to look past those gameplay quibbles.

A final quibble - they've mistranslated "yearly" as "quarterly", so you'll see a lot of financial reports referring to a 12-month period as a "quarter".

I was not familiar with the A-Train series.

I was expecting a nice transport tycoon / railroad tycoon game.
And, in all likelihood, there is one here.

What I was not expecting is to be bombarded by NPC messages all the time, two lines at a time. The pacing of the tutorial is sluggish as the game tries to tell some kind of story and present some generic characters instead of just giving you an actual tutorial.

I gave up on completing the tutorial - and I'm the kind of person who has completed the tutorial for every Paradox games, Football Manager games, Nobunaga Ambition, and the like, those are often considered some of the most frustatingly boring tutorials; I'm saying this as a reference of my tolerance toward tutorials.

The included scenarios also seem to have some level of dialog (hopefully not as much as the tutorial) distracting from the strategy gameplay, and I found the interface a bit obtuse to learn without the "help" of the tutorial.

Really wish this game simply had a PDF Manual. Would have been a thousand times better.

TL;DR: consider this review a possibly positive one if you don't mind a frustatingly long tutorial that has a lot of filler dialog (two lines at a time). The game seems to be good if you can get past that.
Otherwise, I can't recommend it.

What a wonderful game. Honestly. It's worth the money for sure.

If you're a fan of OpenTTD (or similar), but felt like the money management aspect was too simple, and/or the game was too shallow, then this game is for you.

You can make long- or short-term investments into stocks of other companies for extra cash or losses (and others can invest into your company).

You can personally transform a tiny town into a striving metropolis by connecting it to your network and regularly servicing it with a passenger train, then constructing some small residential towers or commercial buildings that will also be an extra source of income.

You can allow a city to expand by supplying it with construction materials; it might be cheapest to import, or transport across half the map, or maybe it's best to just buy some industry buildings for your company.

You can build an underground train line, provided you have a couple hundred million dollars at hand.

You can borrow 1 billion dollars from the bank. (And go bankrupt after you forget about it and then a couple years later have to pay it back.)

You can customise the times that your trains leave their sheds in the morning to deal with the peak hour rush.

You can build a bus line servicing a major bus interchange.

You can build a tram line.

You can research better vehicles, improve the existing once, and more.

You can view your city in 3D.

Whatever you do; expect to do a lot of planning, and get very attached to your creation.

The amount of detail is just absolutely incredible, and it makes the gaming experience extremely enjoyable.

Pros:
nostalgia
watching your cities grow
supplying mattrials to grow the city

Meh:
laying out tracks

Cons:
Routing is terrible
# of trains is capped
Freight trains cannot change car types at stations.
micromanaging exports.


The price $$$$ for this is way way too much, $5-10 range it would be OK.


Open TTD is far better with more variety, and its free!
RT2 is better for a classic experience for way less if you can get it too run.

I played A-Train a lot back in '92. I thought this version was a bit expensive, but I bought it anyways. Unfortunately during the intervening 2+ decades I have become accustomed to friendlier UI's and graphics. This purchase turned out to be a major disappointment.

Just my favorite game.
After such a long wait :)

I played pretty much all "A" predecessors and there were always some questions for me unanswered.
Now I am very happy that there are finally good and profound tutorials, it makes all sense now.

The graphics ... are a matter of taste. At some moments the game looks really great.
But then again there are not so beautiful textures as for example bought land.
The menus are good and really serve their purpose.

Sometimes the employees chatter too much, but that is like in reality.
I can live with it and skip it with some clicks.
(Except the "Kraftwerk" reference, which I found really great)

One thing amazes me: The price. Financially not a big problem for me...
But it's like the person who decided to offer it for € 60, has never played this game before.
I know it is an expensive Nintendo port but this is not ok for your P & L statement.
It is also hard to recommend it further.


Wishes that will probably never come true:
~ "State of interest" option (means different tilesets)
~ Helicopters, ships like in A5 :)
~ Artdink's "Carnage Heart" with Multiplayer on PC ;)

For folks who aren't familiar with this series, A-Train's gameplay puts more emphasis on low-level track/schedule management (scheduling off-hours and precisely when trains leave a station) whereas transporting goods is both more abstract and passive--up until this sequel, there used to be just one generic good you could transport--and most of the city construction is triggered by the AI automatically when goods are available.

Great Game For:

- People who like long-term planning and managing details (even more so than is typical in transport management games). In A-Train, it's possible to create a rail system with express trains weaving past local trains during rush hours.

Pros:

- This version is great for folks new to the series as the tutorial is extensive and lays out the fundamentals of the game well.
- It has the most transport options of any entry in the series (trains, streetcars, buses)
- New mechanics (new buildings with advancing epochs), researching new technologies.

Neutral:

- I found the full 3D of A-Train 8/9 distracting and frustrating when laying tracks, so I don't mind the isometric 3D here at all.

Cons:

- The game was created for the Nintendo 3DS, so some of the interface controls feel clunky on the PC. Laying incline tracks in particular tends to be a hassle, as you have to try via trial and error if an incline in a particular location is possible.
- The pricing at $60. I understand though that this is largely because this is a niche genre and there are a limited number of players who would play this game.

Ok, this games costs a lot, but is the finnest trasport sim/tycoon game since railroad tycoon series.
You must play the 3 scenarios tutorial for know all aspects of the game. They are very long but without them you can't play this game. The learning curve is a bit hard, but with time and patience, you can find a really gem in this game.
You can manage everything at very deep level. You can buy train, bus, tram and set them for working hours, time departure, tornaround, waiting time..... build roads and railroads of different types and visuals, buy lands, depot, many kinds of station, stock market, goods with supply and demand system, research, cities development... and many more. There isn't a game more complete than this. There is a lot of micromanagement, but you can handle easy with time and practice
If you like tycoon games, this is a game for you

likly the best verson of Atrain avaible on the pc. sure its priced a bit steep, but... compared to atrain 9 v4, this fetures alot more core mechanics to keep things intresting, such things include R & D, expanded freight options, streetcars and the like. it also fetures extended tutorials which are kinda optional, (it does lock out construction/map maker mode until you did all three tutorial maps though) the tutorials while helpful, do restrict your tools a little too much. that being said,

The art is really what makes this game feel soo good, little details like weather, lighting and day and night being nailed in a bit more charming way then the native pc options in the atrain series.

for those who dont play atrain games, this is a really good first game in the series to get into.
Atrain is basicly a game of realistate management though the use of tranist and logistics, as well as brute force investments. and as such can get rather complex if you want to make it such, at the same time, simple projects work quite nicely and allow you to expand your company over time as you come to grips with how things work. if your really clever though, you can do things like buy lots of land while its cheep, and then build a setup that would convert it into "high value" land, then selling it off for profit. or even better, building your own buildings. overall, a really deep and mature busness sim.

that being said, Its a time sink game that requires a bit of investment in time and effort, if you can not commit to giving it a day or two of play time (24 hours or more) you might not want to buy it. still worth it though.