Believe it or not A-Train came out in 1987, two years before Sim City and seven years before Transport Tycoon. I would describe it as a blend of both types of game. The main thrust of the game is to build transportation networks to enhance the viability of the region in which your company is located. But there are also some aspects of city building involved as well with regards to owning subsidiaries. A-Train is
significantly more complex than Sim City or Transport Tycoon or Cities Skylines or any of them. It is nauseatingly complex and you will need to play through or read through the tutorials to have any clue. If you skip the tutorials you're quickly going to be lost.
You'll be managing your company, buying and selling stocks, preparing an IPO, juggling subsidiaries, managing domestic trade, managing international trade, courting investors, raising capital for large-scale projects, promoting growth in towns and villages, designing road systems, designing rail networks, planning routes and timetables for buses/trucks/passenger rail/freight rail, moving construction materials from production/storage facilities to places where they are needed, balancing your budget, working with the local governments and taking advantage of subsidies, operating resorts, managing tourism, internal R&D and of course real estate!! And all of this in order to complete the scenario objectives which can include a wide range of tasks. You might need 400,000 tourists annually in the region, you might need to increase the regional population by 2,000,000 over the course of five years, you may need to achieve 100,000,000,000 in total assets while maintaining a profit and you only have five years to do it.
There's a fucking lot going on in A-Train games. I've played a lot of A-Train 9 4.0 (fully 3D with a realistic aesthetic) and I have played a decent amount of A-Train PC Classic (classically-styled isometric graphics) and both of them are fundamentally the same game. I really liked the isometric versions of the games which is what you have with the Switch version. But the more realistic style is also very good and I have few complaints. You're just going to have to learn how to play the games if you are planning on getting them. It might take a few attempts before it really hooks you. But stick with it because the A-Train city simulation games are easily the best of the genre and extremely rewarding. And of course nobody fucking plays them! Go figure.
What really sets this game apart for me is that you have the Transport Tycoon-like gameplay in which you are expanding existing towns and villages by providing them with people and raw materials. This can be enhanced by funding the construction of your own factories, commercial properties and residential buildings. But doing it yourself is very expensive and not feasible right out of the gate except for maybe one or two buildings. The Sim City styled gameplay comes in with managing your relations with local officials and government and dealing with your neighbors. Where the game really becomes its own thing though is the sheer depth of those systems as well as the addition of a plethora of business-related options and opportunities. The other major aspect of this game is that materials and products are tangible objects in the simulation. You need to allocate space to store these materials and if you have a huge stockpile of fish in the Northwest but need to sell it to your neighbor in the South, you've got to have the infrastructure in the right places to make that happen or else it won't happen. Building materials won't magically teleport to a place where construction is happening. And while construction does happen without your help, you can significantly speed up the process by moving materials to the places they need to be or to places that you want to grow.
If you provide a small hamlet with materials to grow and a steady flow of people passing through, you'll slowly pick off a few that decide they want to live there. And once your hamlet grows large enough it will begin to have its own ambitions and develop its own center of gravity that you can then take advantage of. All of which helps you build capital which allows you to purchase stocks to gain benefits from those companies which enhance your bottom line which helps you construct your IPO so that you can go public and start really raising capital for big stuff.
Dude. A-Train fucking rocks. It is the best. This game is very misunderstood. It is an all-encompassing city/business management simulation, not just a city builder. There's also a map editor that is pretty great if you are extremely autistic.
Here is A-Train PC Classic. This guy is a dope, but is a good representation of how many players will approach this game. He wants to skip ahead and get right to it which is a mistake beyond some of the basics because it gets very complex, very fast. He says you can't skip stations when the option is clearly visible in his own video and this is after he's complained about the tutorials being too long and how he already knows how to play. So don't take his word for it, this guy is a cautionary tale of coming into A-Train and thinking you know your shit. You don't.
Here is A-Train 9 v4.0. This guy is much more experienced and knows what he is doing. Enjoy and consider taking his word for it. As you can see this game's style is significantly different than PC Classic. But all of the myriad systems are there. So you'll get a very good experience with either game, but I would say that A-Train 9 v4.0 is a bit more complex with its simulation. There's also a 5.0 but I don't think they translated it. Though you can still manage if you know how to play.
Play A-Train, friends. It's the city simulator you never knew you wanted. And for the turbospergs out there, apparently All Aboard Tourism (Switch) has waifu and husbando designs by the guy that did Etrian Odyssey.
