Honest Thought: We're Playing It Wrong.

[Mycelium]

I want to preface this that the preview trailer is really not helping the game's case and it's giving people the wrong idea of what kind of game this is. At it's core, it's an atmospheric builder/idle experience packaged as a bad action game.

Voidtrain needs to stop trying to parade as an action-packed adventure, and it could do much better without brainless shooter NPCs at stations or random mines wrecking your stuff like a minecraft creepy for no reason. In similar vibes to Satisfactory, it's about slowly building yourself up for nothing and enjoying the view while you wait for things to be done. I grinded hard to get to tier 14 tech to the point that I'm too far ahead from the main quest, and I eventually stopped running everywhere, set my steam engine to slow, and started admiring the view with the music. That moment changed my experience entirely.

The longer you watch in the distance, the more gates you pass through, the more you'll notice little details in the distance. Arrows sunk into the depth of the void, broken bows floating above. Shattered swords and bells, chains, sails and flags. The vibes that giants battled in this space and we're just witnessing the aftermath is wonderful. It's relaxing.

This game is fooling itself into trying to be like Bioshock Infinite, when it's really just a train simulator in the oceanic void. It's a semi-idle relaxation game with frankly unnecessary action bits. And if played for what it really is, it's lovely. The game goes as fast or as slow as you go, and while the pressure to follow the questline and gather resources feels high, I spent three gates just casually grabbing whatever was in range of my grappling hook and still managed to build two full wagons, upgrade one to the max, build every basic structures as I enjoyed the soundtrack. There is no real need to go fast and furious on it.

So, start a game, enjoy the show, skip the fights unless the quest forces you to. Grind to the grappling hook then the rest is just relaxation. Give the atmospheric run a try, I hope you'll like it like I did.

[Rhuya]

Yeah, that's what I figured out pretty early on. They do have some serious work to do though in terms of reducing the grind a bit, expanding storage and changing the multi tier crafting stations to upgrades instead of individual units.

[Jackie Daytona]

I like the goons you shoot, like void police. Hoping for more cosmic enemies as well. and Train to train battles with Void goons.

[Y'all Hear Sumn?]

Grind reduction would be nice, UI QoL would be nice too. The delays on almost all interactions slow the game down a lot.

[Tachyon]

I played this back in 2021 on Epic and soon realised it's a simplistic, very, very grindy game with not a lot happening. Nothing inherently wrong with that, given it's EA status back then, but it sounds like very little has changed. It's like Raft but not nearly as good

The OP has described the game exactly as I remember it, too.

[Ultimoron]

Somehow every odd station is a dead point, where nothing is triggered, so i thought if i advance quickly enough i can skip those empty sations, but not going to happen.

i went ultra slow on the track, made stop to collect anything up and rush ahead in the tech tree as efficiant as possible...

and i guess you are right on that.
This game is not meant to be played with a mindset to be 110% time efficient....

[Shield of Ultramar]

(Was trying to make a more concrete point but it kind of just turned into a ramble, and I'm too tired to edit it to make more straight-forward, so take it as you will. 乁( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ㄏ
TL;DR: Game is incredibly fun, but dear god does it feel like it's having an identity crisis)

Me and my friend were talking about this idea yesterday, how it feels like we're playing it wrong like you said as it almost punishes you for being extremely efficient. We've been playing always on slow, grabbing every single resource we can, and advancing so far down the tech-tree that we've been stuck on certain phases for hours as we wait for the story to catch up to us. Going 20 hours into a single train and still not seeing so many features, such as the ability to build basic walls and make our train feel like more of a, well, train. Or how combat often feels... odd, given it often feels like the enemies have peashooters and the hitboxes often don't makes sense, especially with certain items around the map. And it got us thinking; Are WE the ones playing it wrong?

Thus, we set our engine to full-speed-ahead, and didn't bother swimming around and instead just sat on the sides of the engine grabbing things as they went by. And yeah, it felt good. We felt like we were finally make progress on the story... Until 26 crates worth of resources ran out entirely VERY quickly, including the very fuel and water we needed to keep our engine moving. We had built and researched too quickly it felt, especially with how little Level 2 fuel sources we were getting or making due to needing them for our Level 2 production buildings for research. Thus, we were back to going always at slow and trying to refill our stores. We started making progress on research again, but once again, we outpaced the story by a substantial margin. So much so that we've been at Research Phase 20 for about four hours of in-game play because we still haven't gotten Acid to drop, and apparently, it's tied to particular story elements later on.

As such, we've come to the conclusion: The game is extremely fun and we will keep playing it, but it really does feel like it's having an identity crisis. Is it trying to be an action-thriller with chase scenes and combat? The trailers and in-depth weapon customization would certainly say so, but our 20 hours in tells us no, given we have not engaged another train ONCE, and combat feels too easy. (And jank enough to make us think it was an after-thought) Is it trying to be a more survival-focused game akin to Raft with an additional focus on atmosphere? The beautiful scenery and story pacing especially would certainly imply so, but the grind, especially just to research items, would imply quite the opposite.

[SirCuddlesWorth]

+1 Mischief