For folks who aren't familiar with this series, A-Train's gameplay puts more emphasis on low-level track/schedule management (scheduling off-hours and precisely when trains leave a station) whereas transporting goods is both more abstract and passive--up until this sequel, there used to be just one generic good you could transport--and most of the city construction is triggered by the AI automatically when goods are available.

Great Game For:

- People who like long-term planning and managing details (even more so than is typical in transport management games). In A-Train, it's possible to create a rail system with express trains weaving past local trains during rush hours.

Pros:

- This version is great for folks new to the series as the tutorial is extensive and lays out the fundamentals of the game well.
- It has the most transport options of any entry in the series (trains, streetcars, buses)
- New mechanics (new buildings with advancing epochs), researching new technologies.

Neutral:

- I found the full 3D of A-Train 8/9 distracting and frustrating when laying tracks, so I don't mind the isometric 3D here at all.

Cons:

- The game was created for the Nintendo 3DS, so some of the interface controls feel clunky on the PC. Laying incline tracks in particular tends to be a hassle, as you have to try via trial and error if an incline in a particular location is possible.
- The pricing at $60. I understand though that this is largely because this is a niche genre and there are a limited number of players who would play this game.

A-Train PC Classic is a real estate development game, disguised as a train game. Yes, you manage trains, but the real strategy is in buying up land, making it valuable, and building condos and offices on top of it to make money. The job of your transit network is to stimulate demand, not to actually turn a profit. Instead, you’ll be buying up all the land in some sleepy suburb, running a train to it, and then selling the land for double the price you bought it. Better yet, you can skip the middleman and do the construction yourself, and be the sole owner of an entire city worth of apartments and movie theaters.

I’ve played many city and transit simulators, but A-Train is the only one that has deepened my understanding of urbanism. Beneath its cute graphics, A-Train has a powerful simulation of how and why cities develop, with a focus on exactly the things that matter: connections, land, and proximity. In SimCity, you are a god, laying down places for your people to grow wherever you like. In A-Train, you’re just the enabler - you build the infrastructure, and you hope it all works out. The city has a life apart from you. People will actually build new buildings and roads, even if you do nothing. But, if you put down a few crucial elements, you can multiply the city’s growth. I feel like urban planners think like A-Train and not SimCity - they are trying to tweak a complicated system towards some goal, with limited powers.

(And if you, as an American or European, ever wondered why public transit agencies in Japan and Singapore are actually profitable, look no further! This game is the answer: they are primarily in the real estate market, and only run trains because it benefits their real estate.)

Besides having one of the most satisfying city-building experiences I’ve seen in a game, the other appeal of A-Train is how charming it is graphically. The isometric graphics might be old school (SimCity 2000!) but the execution is spot-on. The look of your entire city changes with the season and weather. Compare this to the 3D A-Train games made by the same company, and the difference is night and day: the 3D models are clunky and soulless, while this game oozes with personality. Everything is also very Japanese: you’ll have cherry blossoms in the spring, and there are old temples hidden in many of the maps, waiting for some tourists. When I found myself in Osaka last year, I looked out of the window on my train, and was shocked by how much real-life actually looked like this game.

My biggest gripe with this game is obviously cost. $60 for a DS game ported to PC is absurd. The other problem with this game is time commitment - a scenario takes maybe 40 hours to finish if you’re decently good. The game simulates every minute of a year. It would benefit from being perhaps 4x faster. Finally, a lot of systems in the game are poorly explained. I've attempted to write a guide with some tips on how to get started on the game. It can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KhGVELrQFlvOGNyPoNZUKTSt2V6fABa84BWgFYDAaDo/edit?usp=sharing

Feedback is appreciated.

likly the best verson of Atrain avaible on the pc. sure its priced a bit steep, but... compared to atrain 9 v4, this fetures alot more core mechanics to keep things intresting, such things include R & D, expanded freight options, streetcars and the like. it also fetures extended tutorials which are kinda optional, (it does lock out construction/map maker mode until you did all three tutorial maps though) the tutorials while helpful, do restrict your tools a little too much. that being said,

The art is really what makes this game feel soo good, little details like weather, lighting and day and night being nailed in a bit more charming way then the native pc options in the atrain series.

for those who dont play atrain games, this is a really good first game in the series to get into.
Atrain is basicly a game of realistate management though the use of tranist and logistics, as well as brute force investments. and as such can get rather complex if you want to make it such, at the same time, simple projects work quite nicely and allow you to expand your company over time as you come to grips with how things work. if your really clever though, you can do things like buy lots of land while its cheep, and then build a setup that would convert it into "high value" land, then selling it off for profit. or even better, building your own buildings. overall, a really deep and mature busness sim.

that being said, Its a time sink game that requires a bit of investment in time and effort, if you can not commit to giving it a day or two of play time (24 hours or more) you might not want to buy it. still worth it though.

I played A-Train a lot back in '92. I thought this version was a bit expensive, but I bought it anyways. Unfortunately during the intervening 2+ decades I have become accustomed to friendlier UI's and graphics. This purchase turned out to be a major disappointment.

Pros:
nostalgia
watching your cities grow
supplying mattrials to grow the city

Meh:
laying out tracks

Cons:
Routing is terrible
# of trains is capped
Freight trains cannot change car types at stations.
micromanaging exports.


The price $$$$ for this is way way too much, $5-10 range it would be OK.


Open TTD is far better with more variety, and its free!
RT2 is better for a classic experience for way less if you can get it too run.

Ok, this games costs a lot, but is the finnest trasport sim/tycoon game since railroad tycoon series.
You must play the 3 scenarios tutorial for know all aspects of the game. They are very long but without them you can't play this game. The learning curve is a bit hard, but with time and patience, you can find a really gem in this game.
You can manage everything at very deep level. You can buy train, bus, tram and set them for working hours, time departure, tornaround, waiting time..... build roads and railroads of different types and visuals, buy lands, depot, many kinds of station, stock market, goods with supply and demand system, research, cities development... and many more. There isn't a game more complete than this. There is a lot of micromanagement, but you can handle easy with time and practice
If you like tycoon games, this is a game for you

Just my favorite game.
After such a long wait :)

I played pretty much all "A" predecessors and there were always some questions for me unanswered.
Now I am very happy that there are finally good and profound tutorials, it makes all sense now.

The graphics ... are a matter of taste. At some moments the game looks really great.
But then again there are not so beautiful textures as for example bought land.
The menus are good and really serve their purpose.

Sometimes the employees chatter too much, but that is like in reality.
I can live with it and skip it with some clicks.
(Except the "Kraftwerk" reference, which I found really great)

One thing amazes me: The price. Financially not a big problem for me...
But it's like the person who decided to offer it for € 60, has never played this game before.
I know it is an expensive Nintendo port but this is not ok for your P & L statement.
It is also hard to recommend it further.


Wishes that will probably never come true:
~ "State of interest" option (means different tilesets)
~ Helicopters, ships like in A5 :)
~ Artdink's "Carnage Heart" with Multiplayer on PC ;)

I'll give the PC version a very weak recommendation. This is one of the rare cases where I'd pick "neutral" if I could.

I've put hundreds of hours into the Nintendo 3DS version of this game, and was excited to try the PC version. The core gameplay of A-Train Classic is excellent, and I expected that the PC version would be an all-around improvement over the 3DS version, which had to cram an extremely complex simulation into a handheld gaming device with limited CPU power.

It turns out that the PC version feels like a sloppy port of the 3DS game (a sentence I never expected to use in my life). In the PC version, I always feel like I'm fighting with the user interface. There are many different panels and windows you can open, but although you can move most of them around the screen, you can't dock them, so they'll always be obscuring some of the map unless you hide them. I often find that some window is covering up something on the map I need to see, and have to waste time micromanaging the windows. This is particularly problematic on small screens. Worse, certain context windows cannot be moved at all and can really get in the way on small screens. For the windows that you can move around, if you are using the mouse to pan the man and accidentally drag the cursor over a window, it will immediately stop panning the pan and start dragging the window.

Some of the keyboard shortcuts don't work in situations where they should. For example, the keyboard shortcuts to pan the map stop working when you're placing road or track, forcing you to pan by click-and-dragging with the mouse. Since the mouse is also what you're using to place the road/track, this can lead to accidentally placing road/track and then having to undo.

Aside from irritating user interface issues, this is a solid simulation game with the potential to give you many hundreds of hours of playtime. Although it masquerades as a rail simulation, it is in fact a complete city-building simulation with as much depth as any SimCity style game. You can play this game in free-play, but where it really shines are the scenarios which require you to meet certain targets (e.g. build 100km of railways, attain yearly profits of $1 billion) within a fixed period, which add a great puzzle element on top of the city planning and economy gameplay. Certain elements of the gameplay are tedious or not very well designed (particularly managing truck and bus routes), but those are the exception rather than the rule, and any hardcore sim fan should easily be able to look past those gameplay quibbles.

A final quibble - they've mistranslated "yearly" as "quarterly", so you'll see a lot of financial reports referring to a 12-month period as a "quarter".

What a wonderful game. Honestly. It's worth the money for sure.

If you're a fan of OpenTTD (or similar), but felt like the money management aspect was too simple, and/or the game was too shallow, then this game is for you.

You can make long- or short-term investments into stocks of other companies for extra cash or losses (and others can invest into your company).

You can personally transform a tiny town into a striving metropolis by connecting it to your network and regularly servicing it with a passenger train, then constructing some small residential towers or commercial buildings that will also be an extra source of income.

You can allow a city to expand by supplying it with construction materials; it might be cheapest to import, or transport across half the map, or maybe it's best to just buy some industry buildings for your company.

You can build an underground train line, provided you have a couple hundred million dollars at hand.

You can borrow 1 billion dollars from the bank. (And go bankrupt after you forget about it and then a couple years later have to pay it back.)

You can customise the times that your trains leave their sheds in the morning to deal with the peak hour rush.

You can build a bus line servicing a major bus interchange.

You can build a tram line.

You can research better vehicles, improve the existing once, and more.

You can view your city in 3D.

Whatever you do; expect to do a lot of planning, and get very attached to your creation.

The amount of detail is just absolutely incredible, and it makes the gaming experience extremely enjoyable.

I really want to like this game. I really do. The mechanics seem awesome and deep. The problem is the UI. Half my clicks don't seem to register, and whenever I accidentally move the window (the game runs in windowed mode only btw), the game crashes, and there's no autosave. Moreover, English support is pretty spotty and there's some shady stuff around the publisher with regards to the latest A-Train installment.

At least I got it on sale. I'd say don't try it unless you can get it at a discount.