Recent reviews by Caesar Leo

WORST GAME. NO SUPPORT. CRASHES ALL THE TIME. SUPER FINIKY.

After all the hype surrounding this game I was keen to get my hands on it given that it has native vr support. Having spent appx 4hrs on it these are my findings so far.

Cons:

1. While the vr experience is unlike any other train sim out there the motion controller experience is less than spectacular. I often found myself stretching in excess of a meter to try and latch onto the levers with limited success and often times even this was not good enough. This is either due to a bug and/or the lack of settings to fine tune game operations. It would be awesome to have the choice of control method while in vr mode, we should remember that not all vr sets may have included motion controllers and as such the ability to have mouse control would be a viable work around.
2. While in vr mode keyboard functions dont seem to respond, extremely frustrating given the issues with the motion controllers.
3. The interface is less than intuitive with very limited functionality and not to mention no save and load functions apart from the autosave.
4. Lack of hands on controller device support, it is unfathomable for a simulation game in this day and age not to have full controller support. With the advent of control platforms such as rail driver this is a huge disappointment even for a game in development. One would at least expect partial support.

Pros:

1. It's a freaking train sim with native vr support.... (about time)
2. No known issues with non vr mode.
3. It is still in development.
4. A steal of a price for the amount of fun to be had (assuming bugs are addressed in a timely manner) and/or that you are playing in non vr mode.

My overall opinion is that this is an exciting new direction for train sims to be heading, there is a certain satisfaction one gets from stepping out the cab and physically (within the virtual realm that is) coupling up cars, handling manifests and planning your routes, however dont be throwing aside your copy of tsw just yet as there is a long way to go before this game can be considered a fore runner in the train sim world. For the price been asked it is a pleasantly refreshing but extremely frustrating experience that will leave you longing for more. I am looking forward to seeing what direction the developers take this brand, i give it 3 out of 8 notches.

Okay so my first take on this game is that its riddled with issues. Right from the very get go you are left completely wanton, now i realise that this is a german sim but come now guys not everyone speaks german, what use is it of me downloading an english install only to have everything in german (one demerit). Okay so moving on seeing as there is apparently no way around this, next we have the interface, while it could be a little bit more userfriendly and perhaps presented in a more visually appealing way after playing around with it you should be able to navigate it with relatively minimal stress, which brings us to the tutorials, while relatively straight forward actual translation of that information becomes somewhat cumbersome because the keys are not quite mapped as described in the tutorial (Shift Z for example is actually Shift Y). So alas feeling rather chipper with myself having ever so painfully navigated the first few steps i find myself confronted with a situation which requires me to pan the camera in order to view a certain piece of equipment, now take into consideration i am using a laptop which has no center mouse button an up to which time i was dreading not to have to come across such a situation so needless to say dead in the water. Now the point been here that that while there is some kind of game controller customization (ie, key mapping etc albeit very limited) there appears to be no hat switch functionality, further more precise tuning for racing wheels such as the driving force gt and so on which have 900 degrees of turning radius more or less is extremely lacking and to be quite honest borders on non exsistance. Okay so resigning myself to the fact that it'll take me forever and a day to actually do a successful trip (passngers the works) i decide to just jump into the game based on what little info i've manged to muster up and here goes im in the bus its actually running and in gear everything seems like we good to go so give her the gas and bam im bouncing, crashing scrapping the whole works, more like a rodeo than a bus ride okay so i let things settle down a bit (apparently if you crank the graphics settings too high the game goes beserk all this despite having a more than capable machine so lower the settings and things seem to be a bit better, now just to perhaps say something obvious, im paying for an experince in its full glory and not some half blur world and footlong draw distances but anyway moving on...) so driving along now everything is just dandy trying to get a feel for things go and step on the brakes and half near fly out the windshield (theres that pesky precise game controller tuning thing again) so basically you want to use the brakes with without actually using them hmmmm go figure. So In a nutshell ive owned this game for two days and thats about the progress ive made, esentially as much progress as a moss growing up the side of an old english castle wall. Now before the naysayers get all excited i am yet to try it out on another machine which is more than a monster enough to push the graphics, did i mention that the laptop is no slouch either btw pretty sure i did but anyway thats that. For the record i am a hardcore die hard sim fanatic so pls reserve otherwise personal vendettas to your loo, i know the benchmarks of great sims and this one while it will have its second day of rekoning with me on a different machine at which time its final judgement will be passed as it stands i give it 1.5 out of 5. Money badly spent.