The first was an extremely fun experience, which I had the pleasure of reviewing. It’s a singular premise: building a railway line in fits and starts, while the train moves. Obviously, I jumped on the tracks for its sequel. However, it took very little for me to abandon the title in Early Access, consumed by extreme frustration.
Developer Indoor Astronaut starts with an obligatory, long and boring tutorial, in which it explains the same mechanics that were already embedded in my mind. If the only problem was pressing the space bar to skip the explanations every two minutes, this first encounter with the game would be bearable. The real obstacle is that the difficulty curve at the beginning is a steep ramp, practically a wall. The sequel not only starts with more challenges than the original game but also doesn’t release the bot’s help until the very end of the tutorial.
Unrailed 2 greatly expands the scope of interaction options with the environment, procedurally generates more intricate maps and, with all this, breaks a paradigm established in the previous game: the possibility of playing solo. The option still exists in this sequel, but the lone player will need to work hard to keep this train running on the tracks and what could be a relaxing title ends up turning into an exercise in stress. With the robot receiving instructions, this journey becomes enjoyable again. I imagine that with a bunch of friends playing simultaneously, the title changes completely, combining maximum fun with some need for coordination of efforts.
Despite the regrets, I went through the tutorial, unlocked the bot and, finally, Unrailed 2 started to pay off for me: the reward is still there, just more difficult to obtain and manage.
Unrailed 2 is also being built with the train moving
As it is an Early Access title, I imagine that Unrailed 2 must go through some adjustments before release. The roguelite character is strongly marked here, which means that the player must “grind” random maps several times in the hope of achieving a tiny evolution, which will almost nothing increase the chances of him going further in his next attempt.
The luck of the title is that it provides satisfactory gameplay, so that the punishment of starting over from scratch in the same biome ends up being less severe. Still, it’s a bad feeling to see an incorrigible mistake bring about the end of your journey and witness your train’s total derailment for endless seconds.
For a game only available for PCs at first, it’s quite annoying that its entire interface is designed for control and practically ignores the existence of a mouse on the machine. The only time the game uses a mouse is to activate the command wheel for the bot (if you are in a multiplayer match, the wheel converts to an emoji wheel). It’s counterintuitive to remove one hand from the keyboard to use this feature, especially since the commands themselves inside the wheel have shortcut buttons.
Item capture sensitivity also feels more fragile than in the previous game. This is because Unrailed 2’s zoom level is a little further away, but also because the hitbox isn’t always consistent. This is yet another aspect that can and should be corrected over time.
Hurricane trailer!
Still, despite a relatively long list of problems, it’s undeniable that Unrailed 2 is addictive. Its charm lies in the delightful mechanics (which could just be a little more precise or clear), the likable characters (which can now be quite customizable visually) and the captivating soundtrack. All of this adds up to invite the player to have another attempt, another ride, another game, even though they know that the end of this railway will be a disaster.
Indoor Astronaut has a lot of work to do to adjust all the screws on that locomotive. Fortunately, the base of the game is perfect and the many additions are still at the limit where they don’t hurt the original simplicity too much. There are strange new carriages, new biomes, challenging new events that can appear mid-match, tasks that grant additional rewards, and other additions that increase its complexity, for those willing to delve deeply into the experience.
On the other hand, for those who just want to hang out every now and then, with friends laughing, or alone with a bot, Unrailed 2 is also a guarantee of a good pastime, once you overcome that initial hill.
