Review of Railsimulator
Written by damiende on November 2, 2007 – 5:17 pm
The long awaited railsimulator has arrived. It’s been 6 years since Microsoft released their trainsimulator. And it’s the people behind it that has made this game. After a few days of playing it looks like Kuju has made a pretty decent game. I’ll call it decent because it has some flaws.
Graphics
The graphics are really good and they run smooth on my computer. The amount of detail inside the cabs are amazing. You can rotate in any angle possible inside the cab. It’s a pleasure to look around the various trains and see all the details. But something thats not good is the grass that grows on the tracks and how the birds fly on autopilot. There are no moving cars as far as I can see just parked ones. Hopefully these things will change in the upcoming patch.
Controls
You have various levels of controls. The simple level the controls are just to accelerate brake and put it in forward or reverse. This goes all the way up to the advanced level where you control everything. You can chose to use the mouse to move the various handles or you can use the keyboard. I found it hard to use the mouse on some of the controls. But I guess thats all a matter of what one would prefer. The controls are easy to figure out as the game comes with a great manual.
Gameplay
Overall I am a bit disappointed I think that they should have added some more trains to the game and some more routes. 4 different lines is not enough for my taste a few more would have given me some more time to look around. Hopefully this will be added later. What I think is a great thing is that you have various eras. You can drive a steam locomotive in the 50s or a commuter train in the 70s. You have various things you can chose to do. You can either drive around the routes or you can play with the various tasks you can do. These range from delivering freight load to running a passenger train. The physics of the trains doesn’t always work like in real life. When you crash with your passenger cars. The train reacts like its been shot out of a cannon. How realistic the physics are in other aspects like speed and weight I don’t know.
But I still would recommend this game to a fan of Microsoft trainsimulator. Despite it short comings I enjoy the game and it’s also fun. The details in the trains makes it a thrilling game to play. And hopefully players are busy making addons in the form of routes and trains.
Overall I would give Kuju railsimulator 8 out of 10.
Until next time
Damiende
Tags: kujo, msts, Railsimulator, trainz
Posted in Trainsimulators |
November 17th, 2007 at 8:24 am
“… as the game comes with a great manual.”
Are you kidding? Or did you get another version? The version I have only has a 16 page document that’s barely worth the name manual.
See also the many complaints about this issue on the official Rail Simulator forum!
The gale is a promising start but there are some annoying issues. I get the impression the game could have used some more testing before its release. Hopefully these things get fixed with a patch soon.
The most annoying however remains the lack of a good manual. Hence, let’s hope someone writes a decent manual soon.
Bart
January 26th, 2008 at 7:27 am
This Rail Sim could be the best ever!
But KUJU were too keen to release a game which is at best, only half tested. The North American version being released so long after the european, 4 months, tells you they were afraid of releasing an half finished project in America.
Even on RAILSIMULATOR’s own forum, the developers are arguing with money paying customers who feel they are being used as the “test bench” As mentioned by Bart, the testing of this sim’ prior to release, wasn’t what it should have been.
The software coding isn’t the best and as a result there is a lot of stuttering or frame rate free as the game updates the graphics, reading this imformation from the hard drive. This is suffered even on high end cpu’s with top of the range graphics cards.
But lets look at the game it’s self.
Four routes each with scenarios and a free roam option. The scenarios are far from exciting but with a bit of imagination and the excellent graphics the player/driver can have that “on the footplate” feel.
The oppertunity to create your own routes is over stressed in a manual which….. as mention by Bart isn’t even a manual in the real sense! Lots to do but no imformation on how to do it.
Basically, KUJU have allowed this Railsimulator to be released on to the open European market with minimal testing and a very poor manual. This has left many buyers of this game feeling hard done by with many returning their games as they can even run them correctly.
Hopefully the forthcoming “fix all” patch will at least address some of the man issues with this sim. The others will as always been “fixed” by the railsim community.
February 17th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
[...] A while back I wrote a review for the game Kuju Railsimulator. You can find my review here. Review of Railsimulator | Rmtexposed Not long after someone "stole" my review and they are now going up against me in the [...]