Voidtrain: Current State vs Early Access Review

[Kkat]

What follows is the review I wrote in 2022 for Voidtrain, which I played in Early Access through another platform. At the time, I was unimpressed but hopeful that the developers would be able to evolve the game into something much more enjoyable. My question is: how much has the game changed from what I describe below?


Old Review

As I write this review, Voidtrain is still in Early Access. I have played over 90 hours and experienced the totality of its current content, completing the tech tree and fully upgrading my train. Still, there is more coming to this game. Bugs may be fixed. Features may be added. An actual story could be included. And I would be remiss not to mention that earlier today the devs announced they will be making changes to one of the most obnoxious elements of the gameplay. So your gameplay experience, should you purchase and play this game, will likely and hopefully be different from mine.

Let me start by saying that Open World Survival Crafting is my game genre of choice, and Base Building is one of my favorite things to do in a game. I came into this game because, if done well, it could be exactly the sort of game I love to play.

And I will admit my experience has probably been biased by having started this game after playing Raft for over 350 hours. A game that did beautifully right virtually everything this game does excruciatingly wrong.

There is a ghost of a good game here.

The basic premise here is that you are an engineer who, having gotten lost, found an abandoned shack that was home to a bizarre experiment involving traveling through another dimension called "the Void" via train. Pursued by Nazis, you make the questionable decision to escape by booting up the portal and riding into the alien world on a trolley. From there, you begin the standard Open World Survival Crafting / Base Building experience of gathering resources, working through tech trees, and turning your humble trolley into a proper locomotive. While dealing with threats both alien and familiar, the latter in the form of Nazis who are already here and dominate the rail lines.

There is so much potential in that idea. But only if handled by a development team really interested in exploring that premise. Sadly, this is not the direction the developers have taken.

There was an early spark of hope. The single most imaginative and engaging moment in the entire game occurs within the first two minutes. The Nazis have found you! You can hear them right outside the door! And your very first task is to lock the door. Which you do. I won't spoil how you do it. But it's amazing!

If the devs had followed through on the game mechanics and level of imagination in that very first interaction with the world, this game could have been something fantastic.

Instead, that bit of magic is never touched on again. Afterwords, all the mechanics are conceptually basic. The Void is generic and repetitive, and exploration isn't actually possible. You are on a literal rail. (And while you are given tools to theoretically travel away from your train, they only work in specific encounters.) You move through one procedurally generated stretch of scattered resources and empty background scenery after another, with stops in between at one of a handful of depot designs, either abandoned or populated by Nazis who are there just for you to kill.

It could have been a wild adventure through increasingly strange and wondrous lands, encountering all sorts of alien threats while uncovering the mystery of the void. Learning the history of human interaction with the Void, including how the Nazis managed to gain such a grip here and what they are planning to do with it. Culminating in defeating that most familiar of enemies. And along the way, uncovering fantastical branches of research, allowing you multiple options to design and develop your trolley into a unique locomotive truly worthy of the name voidtrain.

But the Nazis have no plan. The world has no lore or history. No reason why the background is filled with giant floating bells or candles or broken swords. Some of the challenges that have been added, the arena in particular, are jarringly out of place with what little theme is established. But the worst failing was summed up by my roommate who came over to look at my fully upgraded and completely decorated train:

"It's not even an interesting train."

The one thing that all of your gameplay efforts are ultimately in service of -- the train you are building -- is bland. Despite the otherworldly setting, the technology is mundane: trolley to steam engine to diesel. You don't choose what the engine looks like. You cannot design the shape of the train cars beyond length -- no giving them multiple floors or non-linear layouts. You can keep them flatbed or put shells on them. The shells are all identically shaped with four textures you can unlock (basic, luxury, raider and ship). As of the time I am writing, you cannot even partition the train cars with walls to make interior rooms, nor choose the color of... well, anything.

I have several games which I have long sense completed but will still boot up to just enjoy the bases I have built. Once I had fully upgraded and decorated my train, I looked at it and felt no desire to spend extra time just being there. It just wasn't an interesting space. (Instead, I shut the game down, started up Raft, and spent the evening lounging on my luxury raft.)

With Voidtrain, I see two core problems, and the devs would have to do extreme revisions to address them. The second is that they have made a very grindy and unfun mechanical system. Many of the mechanics create unnecessary busywork or resource costs. (For example: it cost resources to move furniture. I went through 20 wood just trying to place a lamp precisely in the middle of a table because the footprint grid doesn't allow you to see what is beneath it.) The developers need to understand the difference between making something challenging and just making something tedious. Then they have to overhaul basically everything. Every mechanical decision needs to be re-approached from the viewpoint of "is this fun?"

But the first core problem is that there is no sense that the devs put any real thought into their world. "Why are there giant floating bones, bells and arrows in the Void? Who made the giant structures that the German soldiers have built their dinky depots in, and what are their purpose? What is the ecology of the portal birds? Why do the arenas exist and how does that fit in with the lore of the world?"

There is no sense of coherent lore. No world building. I'm not talking about player-found lore; that can be added into the game later. But rather, this is the purveying sense that the devs didn't sit down and work out their world before starting in on the game mechanics. No sense that anything here is here for any reason other than "this would look cool" or "the game could use this kind of challenge". It's not just a sandbox, it's a dumb sandbox. And that makes it nearly impossible to become invested in your character or their journey.

The narrator starts out proclaiming "yeah, this doesn't make sense, but it's a good story"... which is a good idea as it helps the player lower their expectations, but also explicitly highlights a critical flaw in the game. Even if they fix the deep mechanical issues (which the announcement earlier today gives me hope they might, at least to an extent), I fear the devs would be hard pressed to add a good story to what they have presented.

I want exploration in a beautifully fleshed out world with a deep backstory and a plot.

Or, barring that, enjoyable mechanics and the ability to build a really unique train from a wealth of mundane, fantastic and void-themed options. Maybe one that looks kinda like a giant voidleech, with fins that auto-collect resources, which uses prophecies for fuel and hovers over the rails on animated magic energy plates like the ones that form the "you aren't allowed to go backwards" barrier? You know, something imaginative.