A-Train HX

This is possibly one of the most bizarre games I have ever played. I’m not even sure what was going on half the time but here goes.

A-Train HX is a train simulation game where you have to build an enterprise surrounding the railway system. At least that is what I think the premise should be. It is really hard to tell because there are no in-game tutorials and the instruction manual is next to useless. At this point, I gave up at any regular attempt to play the game normally and looked up what others had done to earn the interesting sounding achievements.

Due to the nature of money in the game, there is a very basic - and really stupid - way of ensuring you do not go bankrupt. You have to build a big train station and build hundreds of convenience stores around the outside. I’m talking in excess of a few hundred convenience stores around the station. It looks bizarre and sounds even worse. There is no infrastructure at all. People simply get off the train and start spending hundreds of thousands of pounds in your convenience store empire in the middle of nowhere.

Now because I couldn’t be bothered to play it properly, I am removed from making any ground breaking comments and insights into the strategy required to build a bustling metropolis around the trains and stuff, but I can comment on the horrible controls. Whenever you get near the edge of the map, the camera will not rotate outside of the map zone and instead will zoom in automatically to the closest square to the edge of the map and not go back out. This is really annoying when you consider that the game is impossible to play when it is zoomed in to the max.

Building stuff underground and over water is a massive pain in the ass as well. There is one map that is mostly surrounded by water and in order to get new materials into your world map, you need to build train tracks to the edge of the map. However, for some bizarre and unexplainable reason, if you build the train track all the way to the edge of the map, the trains won’t come in. For some reason, you need to build the last section of track separately to allow the trains to enter the map.

The last thing I have to mention is the music. The music is, to be polite, absolutely horrible. No one could stick sitting it the same room as me when I was playing the game such was the clinky-clunky nature of the music. Another aspect of the music that pissed me off when playing the game was the almost celebratory noise made when the game takes it’s ludicrously high amount of tax. This aspect also makes me think that if you play the game properly, every year when they take the tax payment, you will probably get completely screwed over.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 24 Achievements

There is not much point in me talking about the achievements in this game as I didn’t bother doing anything properly which therefore led to me obtaining them all really easily. Actually, thinking about it, there are two problem achievements.

The first one is for playing the stock market to earn over 10 billion dollars worth of profit. This isn’t overly difficult but it does require you to not play the game and just stare at changing stock prices for a stupid amount of time. A reward for not playing the game feels really stupid.

The less forgivable problem achievement is the one for completing all the default maps. Many people have reported this as a glitched and I thought to myself, in regular cocky fashion, this won’t affect me. Indeed it has been a very long time since I’ve been adversely affected by a glitch however, this one did get me and it was really fucking irritating too. Having read up on the various causes of this one glitching out, I avoided downloading any extra maps, I entered myself on every leaderboard for each of the maps and when I completed the last map and it still didn’t unlock. I then got cross and didn’t play the game for a week.

When I went back to it, it was late at night so that I could get through all the maps in one sitting without causing any undue stress to my family members due to the terrible music. This caused the achievement to unlock but it was about 5 hours of extra gaming I didn’t need.

Downloadable Content – N/A

A-Train HX is an achievement hunter’s game. I personally didn’t find it fun but I’m not a simulation game enthusiast. If I had managed to avoid playing through the whole game twice, I may have nicer things to say but there is no excuse for developers not fixing their games in an age when you can release title updates whenever it takes your fancy.