My first evening with Constracktion, an imminent (Sept 1) railway building curio in which the player must connect industrial plants using a steerable tracklaying train, proved enjoyable and instructive. I learned that…
1. First-person railway construction courtesy of this Diesel Railcar Sim spin-off might not be wholly realistic (Obviously, in real-life, the drivers of tracklaying trains don’t choose their own routes) but it is satisfying and stimulating.
2. On early maps, with difficulty set to ‘easy’, economic factors seem largely irrelevant. Maybe I’ve been lucky, but I’ve yet to run out of track pieces or storage capacity for excavated earth (Additional track and rolling stock can be purchased with revenue generated by the AI trains that shuttle between linked plants).
3. When clumsy line planning and lackadaisical signal placement leads to congestion, it’s possible to fix jams by hopping into the cabs of AI trains and operating them yourself.
4. I probably need to seek out some bridging tips before playing again. Towards the end of last night’s session, wanting to cross a deep gorge, I trusted to automation and bee-lined towards the abyss. Instead of magicking steel lattice out of thin air, my train plummeted like a rollercoaster before trying and failing to clamber up the opposite face of the chasm. Finding myself trapped by physics at the bottom of a spectacular swoop of track, I had no option but to reach for the last autosave.
5. The game’s mini map could be more informative. In the preview build, because track isn’t shown on the corner cartograph, it’s possible to approach industrial facilities from sub-optimal directions. The above image shows me circling a steel mill in an attempt to find and link up with its stub of permanent way.
6. While a tad disorientating initially, the unusual/unattractive multi-row interface at the bottom of the screen is actually rather natty.
7. Connecting an in-progress line to an existing length of track seems fiddly at first, but once you get your eye in and learn to plan ahead, adding points and spurs in preparation for future expansion, the ugly overlaps should become shorter and fewer.
8. As the sim’s tracklaying machines can only work in one direction, and building turntables doesn’t seem to be possible at present, it pays to add ‘turning loops’ to networks here and there.
9. The physics are first rate. Within my first hour I managed to derail my train by reversing too speedily over points, and create the cock-up pictured above by accidentally switching points too early. Usually re-railing takes sixty seconds and is completely automatic. In the above situation, the game threw in the towel and I was forced to load a save.
10. Oskari probably needs to brace himself for a barrage of random map generator requests.