Choo! Choooo! All aboard! Land ahoy! Now, we’re not train experts but we know a good game when we see one – and A-Train: All Aboard! Tourism signals (pun intended) the first-class return (intended again) of a unique management sim on the Switch (again) platform (yep). Coupling (that’s five) railway construction with business management, the A-Train series is relatively underground (six) outside Japan, where it’s been picking up steam (seven) since first crossing the cathode ray tube (eight) in the 1985 Famicom original. For some, this latest arrival (ahem) will be another addictive sim to mainline (sorry); others, though, will be running bored (yikes). (Note: the subsequent 33 train puns in this review will, mercifully, not be demarcated in the text.)
A-Ressha de Ikou – “Let’s take the A-Train” – has seen so many releases over its 36-year history it’s hard to keep track (ok, maybe just one last one). Eventually arriving on platforms from Famicom to FM Towns to Xbox 360 and 3DS, its first great Western release was on PC in 1992. While on the surface A-Train: All Aboard! Tourism may appear to be a primarily construction-driven sim akin to Transport Tycoon, it provides a very Japanese take, where railway management involves getting your fingers into a veritable buffet car of pies, from real estate down to concessions stand retail.
There’s a reason for that: when the UK privatised its national rail in the 1980s, it separated the service provision of the lines from the rolling stock, so different companies own the different parts. In Japan, the approach was to take vertical slices, so JR East, for example, owns all the land, stations, track and trains associated with the services it delivers in Tokyo. Again, we’re not train experts so we couldn’t say which approach is better but, in Tokyo, you will need to collect an evidence slip if you expect your boss to believe that your train was 10 minutes late following an earthquake. In Britain, “leaves on the line” is a traditional reason for total cancellation. We'll let you decide which is best.
Hence a railway management sim in Japan is about managing a huge conglomerate with close ties to government, where the various moving parts need to be made to synergise for maximum profit. For instance, your revenue from transport itself will be somewhat limited but, by investing in land, constructing a station, laying lines and running a service, you can boost the population of an area, causing the land value to rocket, along with the value of your investments. You can then sell your land for a profit, or realise the value of it by installing your own retail operations – the new emphasis in Tourism being on tourist attractions.
The game is structured around scenarios set in fictional Japanese locales between 1955 and 2025, with the buildings, infrastructure and technology changing through the years. In the early scenarios, you will depend heavily on the cast of anime-style colleagues who provide guidance as well as flavour (albeit through some pretty egregious stereotypes). They set out goals such as target revenue, number of tourists or population growth. On meeting a scenario’s goals, you can move on to the next, or just keep playing an open-ended game with what you’ve built.
Since your objectives are not always about money, your success is connected to the prosperity of the region and plays out in dialogue with chirpy local government representatives. You need to serve residents from all stations in life – even those from the wrong side of the tracks – and won’t succeed by simply siding with the better-located suburbs. There’s a gentle sense of symbiosis with your host city, and a respect for harmony, oneness and caring coexistence – ripe for you to siphon off that sweet, sweet JPY.
Perhaps the greatest strength of A-Train: All Aboard! Tourism is that the grand scope of your business doesn’t preclude the satisfying finer points of building pretty train tracks. You can scout good routes on the map, lay lines, and build elevated rails and tunnels to your heart’s – or at least your budget’s – content. But when we say “the finer points”, we mean the very finest points; you have the option to specify exact timetables for multiple trains in and out of a station, deciding which platform they stop at, what speed they leave the station at, whether they will stop at all, how, where and when they will pass other scheduled trains on the line, and so on. You have the tools to design and build full local services with express and semi-express trains all running past one another on the same route, all scheduled to the minute. If efficient railway service timetable design turns you on, then be careful playing A-Train in public.
If all that efficiency sounds too raunchy, however, some of these settings are tucked away in off-by-default advanced options, and the game helpfully explains some simple track designs in its first scenario in case you’d rather ignore the most detailed of details. In fact, A-Train is a fairly complete and intricate experience even in its easy mode, where some complexities are removed around staff morale, fluctuations in passenger numbers and so on. There are many, many hours of fun to be had without stepping off the beaten track, and probably hundreds of hours for real anoraks.
There isn’t space here for even a whistle-stop tour of the deep roster of trains you can develop, the train designer, securities trading, resource exploitation and trading, subsidiary management, bus services with exciting road junctions, build-your-own scenarios shareable and rateable online… Suffice it to say, Artdink is bringing a lot of content here. Credit is also due for a valiant effort at delivering all the options and subtlety not with a delicate mouse pointer but with a big fat controller – and, in handheld mode, a mostly passable touch interface.
But things do start to go off the rails. Although it wouldn’t be fair to criticise A-Train for its complexity – that’s the point – it does bring some game design challenges. The tutorial scenarios are helpful but they are fully-fledged scenarios and they leave plenty of room to get stuff wrong, then throw more instructions at you while your brain is still buffering. A short, simple, on-rails training level, crossing off the basic techniques, would have been helpful. In the throes of the later game, meanwhile, rail planning keeps getting richer long after other mechanics have reached the end of the line and the balance never really gets back on track.
The slow pace of the game is another driver of the game’s appeal, but while a peaceful, somewhat passive interaction with an organically developing city is a soothing way to let off steam, sluggish menus and repetitive commands had that steam coming out of our ears.
The graphics engine is perfunctory. There are options to extend draw distance and toggle some effects, but using these makes the game unplayably slow. However, a click of the left stick toggles an isometric view, with a pleasing, nicely engineered transition, through which the cities look, if we're being generous, quietly characterful. On top of the performance issues, though, we did have two crashes and lost some time, even using autosave to guard against it. (Two patches have been rolled out since release so Artdink is at least attentive.)
Conclusion
It’s hard to express how well a niche game fares with a numerical score. If train business minutiae are your niche, your heart will be all a-flutter; if not, you’ll be all a-bored. Setting the content on one side, there are significant balance, interface and performance issues – but they don’t derail the game entirely. While there are other options for management sims on Switch that are much more light-hearted and accessible, A-Train is something different that educated us and broadened our horizons in the genre. Fans, then, will be stoked to play the series on a new platform; for others with plenty of patience A-Train could be a sleeper hit. (We're really, really sorry about all the puns. Honest.)
Comments 41
Just wanted to clarify that the apology for the puns was added by the editor and I personally offer no apology whatsoever
The asking price for this is really off putting.
I quite liked the one I had on PS2 back in the day. Can’t say the weird anime people fill me with confidence though.
Update: The game just received another patch and my broken save file now loads again.
While I've had a lot of fun in my 60 hours with the game, I wouldn't recommend buying it unless they fix some of the stability issues. I've had the game freeze and crash on me several times with the most recent crash happening while I was saving the game. It now freezes whenever I try to load that save file so I effectively lost about seven hours of progress. It's a shame because aside from that, it's a good game.
@BenAV ouch. That’s even worse than my experience and pretty painful with the amount of work that can go into tweaking everything just right. I guess the advice/warning for anyone who does get this is to save often and on different slots?
http://www.switchiconshowdown.com/detail.php?id=5410
Homescreen icon
I pre-ordered the game on the jp eshop because I never expected it to come out in the west. Or at least not at the same time.
I am really happy they release these niche things worldwide and I hope it sells enough to not make them regret it.
@Arcade_Tokyo Yeah, creating a new save every now and then would be a good idea so I'll likely do that if I ever have it in me to go back to the game. I was playing with the auto-saves turned on and I was saving manually whenever I did a lot of stuff so I wasn't too bothered with the occasional crash setting me back a few minutes here and there but I wasn't expecting it to nuke my save completely. This was after the most recent patch.
And the price? Surely a another mark down for the price
@jarvismp I don't think price should be factored into reviews. A good game is a good game and a bad game is a bad game regardless of what they cost. The price might be the determining factor as to whether you make the purchase or not but the game itself would still be the same if it was 1/10th of the price.
All I can see is SimCity with Etrian Odyssey characters.
Okay this sounds cool. Might have to keep my eye out for this.
I played the demo. It was interesting, but too complex for my taste. I am thankful when a game has a demo! If it was smaller and simpler, i may have given it a go. But i am glad people are enjoying it.
@DDFawfulGuy Ha! I thought the same thing! Speaking of which, I hope the Etrian Odyssey series isn't dead as a result of losing the extra screen.
These screenshots just make me wish for a follow-up to Etrian Odyssey on Switch. Those character designs are gorgeous.
I thought the character art looked like Etrian Odyssey, and what do I know? It seems Yuji Himukai is the character designer!
Great article!
The characters look exactly the same as the ones from Etrian Odyssey series.. interesting.
I tried the demo with high expectations (still missing my Railroad Tycoon hit) and this is NOT the same 😂
It was super clunky to play, the shadows annoyed me (the constantly moving jaggies), I don’t think this is for me.
@jump This is Artdink's flagship series , plus its a Switch game, so the price is not surprising.
Managing a train business looks harder then it steams. I may wait for a sale before I choo choo choose to pick up this game and chug away many hours with it.
@Ishmokin It's also a full retail title in Japan which partially explains the high price globally. I don't think it's that unreasonable considering it's a game with a lot of depth and content so you can certainly get your value for money if it's something you can get into but they do really need to fix the crashes.
@BenAV I agree. What i meant is this game is not meant to be cheap. Its a full premium game and considered like THE train simulation/sim city game of Japan.
@jump I agree. I'd pay about $40 US for it, but I think that's just what a game of this type is worth to me.
I am surprised y’all didn’t review Railway Empire
@jump Your comment made me check the eShop for the price... over fifty quid??!! Blimey! I’d be tempted at around £20, but more than a bullseye? Nope!
These kinds of quirky little games are right up my alley.
I'll have to try the demo, and if I REALLY like it, I'll import the Japanese release (which includes English on the cart).
I think they're batpoo bonkers for charging a whopping AU$90 for this when there is no local physical release though.
Stability issues considering the high cost is also really off-putting. Remember when publishers had a little pride in their end product?
I think I'll just stick with Cities Skylines. This series has always been really hard for me to get into.
"Efficiency porn"
I'LL TAKE YOUR ENTIRE STOCK
Oh looks kinda interesting might pick this up.
£53.99...
Oh looks kinda interesting might wait for a heavy sale.
@jarvismp surely not another.... Great Train Robbery
@WCB oh man I can’t believe I missed that one! Beautiful.
@Arcade_Tokyo I feel like this review could have used a few more puns.
Also, this made me chortle: "If efficient railway service timetable design turns you on, then be careful playing A-Train in public."
Japan is notorious for having a lot of SUPER hard-core train nerds, and even during the pandemic you still see them pretty regularly. My favorite is when I see someone taking a picture of a normal train parked at a normal platform at one of the stations I use on my daily commute because I always think to myself, "man, that's going to be a really boring picture."
Aww man, consider me disappointed. I clicked excitedly on the link thinking it was a review for a spin-off game based on the speedster from The Boys.
Kudos for explaining japanese transport market strcture in a few sentences.. i might forgive you for the puns because of that..(i'm an urban planner and there are lots of collegues who dream of this model)
I saw this popping up in the jap version on the nintendo direct 2 months ago.. I remember looking forward to the amiga version back in '93 .. yeah trains! but with a jap twist! loved railroad tycoon... It didn't feel that much a reall live world back then.. but maybe i was too young for the spreadsheets..
Did download the demo last week, was surprise how much it still looked like the Amiga version.. same perspective.. albeit with a bit more jap feeling due to some more graphics (why do all those emotions have to be put on steroids all the time by the way?)
One problem I have with the series (although you start in 1994, which makes it more understandable), that it completely seems to lack an environmental component.. more mass tourism! just clean out the forest... Transit Oriented Development has been jealous-making japan development policy for years, but here it has a clear downside..
btw the demo is rather generous, so fixed my a-train crave for now (unless it goes on big sale).. I remember playing the amiga demo as well for quite some time.. no 3 minutes and you're out here
@romanista wow, well I’m glad my brief explanation passed muster with an expert! I didn’t get into what that does for urban development – but then I would definitely have been out of my depth. Re environmental impact: well done finding a criticism for lack of detail in this game!
Also, you’re right that the demo is generous (a few hours at least?) and well worth getting for anyone curious.
@Arcade_Tokyo nice. I LOVE me some puns
@WCB I see what you did there! Neat! 🤣
Looks complex. To get good at this game one surely has to... train a lot.
I'm sorry for the apparent self promotion , but I'm trying to start a subreddit so that the people interested in the game have a spot on the internet to talk about it. If you would be interested, it is at r/ATrainGame
https://www.reddit.com/r/ATrainGame/
I would love to play this, but at $60 and no physical edition... yeah, I'll pass.
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