Unrailed! (Switch)
A runaway train brings excitement to whatever media it is featured in, and Unrailed! takes that a step further by having you be the person placing train tracks to prevent it from meeting an explosive end. While the locomotive at the core of the game isn’t careening out of control since you do need time to actually work on the railroad, trying to keep one step ahead of the constantly moving train adds a layer of pressure to the play.
Unrailed! is designed to be played with multiple players, a fact that will become apparent if you pick the single player mode and suddenly find yourself accompanied by a robot you need to give orders to. However, whether you’re on your own with your mechanical partner or playing with up to three other players, the goal of the game is always going to be placing railroad tracks down so your train can safely make it from one station to the next. The process for doing so involves relying on the blocky world around you for resources. Players will immediately need to get to mining stones and cutting down trees to have the materials to build more railroad, the train itself actually carrying the mechanisms that can produce the very tracks it will run across. This does mean a lot of your time will inevitably be spent just hacking away at stone and tree trunks and this admittedly doesn’t ever get more interesting, but the locations your train passes through attempt to pick up the slack.
When a run of Unrailed! begins, you’ll find yourself in a pleasant grassy biome where the work is easy and there is little threatening your work. Some animals might get in your way but you can shove them around, and while bandits will try to grab resources and throw them off the strip of land the game takes place on, they’re not too pesky. This early area helps you get used to one of the most important aspects of the game: planning your route. If your train comes to the end of the tracks, hits into itself, or crashes into a piece of the environment, you’ll lose your train and have to restart from the very beginning. Therefore it’s important to clear paths through the forests and mountains while considering if you have space to walk yourself. Building bridges, making sure the train doesn’t cut you off from areas as it travels, and other little concerns must be accounted for or you won’t even make it to the second Wild West themed biome, and the biomes only get more dangerous from there.
The snow biome introduces snow that is hard to push through, a trip through Hell has the screen annoyingly flip at times to make movement confusing, and the game even takes you to space where flying around with a jetpack seems nice until you notice you’ll need to do a lot more work getting your train across floating asteroids. Many of these complications can come off as more troublesome than interesting mainly because of the game’s flawed approach to difficulty. Unrailed! is a rogue-like with randomized level layouts, meaning that if you lose, you’ll be set back to the very beginning of the game with all your progress erased to try a new arrangement of stages. This does amplify the need to be careful and clever with how you choose your tasks and plan out your train’s tracks, but it also comes with some unfortunate caveats. The first is that, while you can enable checkpoints so you can restart from a train station, it is only at the start of a biome unless you pick the condescendingly named Kids mode where each stations is a checkpoint. However, checkpoints are not save points, and if you do save and quit to continue playing later, you can only load that save file once. This is quite an issue considering Unrailed! doesn’t seem to run perfectly on Switch. Not only are there long hitches as the game loads in new areas, but the game itself can crash, undoing what can amount to an hour of work simply because the game is too committed to its idea of difficulty.
The crashes and lost runs as a result are definitely the part of Unrailed! that stings the most, but while there can be a lot of thought in how your team works together, a lot of the game does end up feeling lackluster. Collecting resources is often not a complicated process and many of the dangers are more bothersome than meddlesome in an exciting manner. Having the lights go out, snow cover everything so you can’t tell what’s on the ground ahead, or screen flip just lead to downtime or waiting for things to return to normal. They don’t really ask for new approaches from the player, and even when they do it’s often a small diversion missing the captivating substance to keep players wanting to press forward. It actually seemed very hard to get players on board for playing Unrailed! once they realized the substance of it. Having to restart all the way or even at a checkpoint in the easier modes still didn’t alleviate the slowness of the action and repetitive tasks, and attempts to play online frustrates as you can be done in by a bumbling player, disconnects, or the lack of communication. You need a devoted set of friends intent on finishing the game and interested in the rather mundane work involved in getting there, but thankfully the robot partner for single player is surprisingly obedient and effective. They do whatever you ask of them and even have some features put in to avoid frustration like still completing a task if their AI can’t find the right path to do so. This can even help you cheese the snow level a bit as it mistakes all the snow for blockages and teleports items around. They can have moments where they are instead unable to do something for seemingly no reason, but they are a serviceable stand-in if you feel compelled to complete the game and can’t get a capable crew on board for potentially frustrating and tedious play.
There are many ideas at play that could have been nice if the game’s core wasn’t so boring. The train can be upgraded at every station you reach provided you’ve been doing things like collecting the golden bolts off the beaten path in levels or completing specific goals like having only one player do the mining, reaching a station in a set amount of tracks, or avoiding bumping into players while dashing around. The train’s wagons can be added to with specialized carts like ghost ones that can be upgraded to turn other wagons intangible so your train is less of a barrier to getting work done, and buying auto-miners or resource-gathering carts can speed up resource acquisition. Regular carts can get pumped up to hold more materials or produce tracks faster, the appreciable upgrades definitely providing a nice reward for putting in some extra effort.
A bit of a weaker idea though are the orange bolts that need to be collected to see the game’s credits in the deceptively named Endless mode. The game doesn’t tell you they’re especially important until you get to the point where it would be too late to gather them since there’s a specific bolt to each biome, and despite being worth twice as much as a golden bolt, they look fairly similar and you might not think to linger in each biome until you grab one until you realize they’re important. Considering the game generally likes you to learn new biomes or dangers through failure and extends its run time by having you lose, this aspect just feels like another little punch to the gut in a game that seems against the idea of player progress.
The Versus mode gets off easy by focusing on competing to build different tracks, the focus on doing things more quickly while sabotaging the other team with a special cannon wagon meaning it is player interaction messing with you rather than the game seeming to be at your throat. While there are other little considerations in the game like making sure to collect water to cool down your engine, there aren’t any extra mechanics or rule sets that will help undo the damage of the flat gameplay. With your runs complicated by annoyances rather than evolving ideas that play into the skillful track building that seems like it would be at the heart of the game’s enjoyment, Unrailed! rarely offers exciting moments to counterbalance the repetitiveness and aggravating interruptions.
THE VERDICT: Unrailed! begins with a lot of promise as a co-op game about working together to plan routes and activities with the looming danger of the runaway train’s untimely end. However, the tasks for doing so aren’t captivating enough to last the length of the game, especially since you’ll need to constantly restart due to the unforgiving save system, having to learn new gimmicks through failure, and outright game crashes instead of train crashes. The railroad work has its moments when you are picking new wagons, trying to figure out the optimal path, or racing to keep up with a train reaching the end of the line, but too many of its complications seem designed to irritate rather than ask for strategy or skill. With the right temperament certain people can squeeze some fun out of it, but Unrailed! goes off the rails too often with its ill-conceived efforts to achieve difficulty.
And so, I give Unrailed! for Nintendo Switch…
A BAD rating. I really tried to give Unrailed! a chance to prove its worth, but when it wasn’t irritating people I roped into playing with me, it was failing in other regards such as throwing in rudimentary ideas of difficulty like screen flipping or outright having the game fail to function. Having the potential for a hard game to wipe all your progress is already an aggravating prospect before you even consider what the substance of the game is, and with the game keeping vital info from the player and not letting them safely learn about some new danger that can end a run really begins to grate on anyone but the most devoted players. Going through early levels again is bland since the complications take a while to get going and even then aren’t interesting so much as ways to make your resource gathering even less appealing. When things are running smoothly this can approach a sort of relaxing rhythm before something is tossed into the mix to ruin that. There are even little issues I didn’t mention like how even on a television display the characters can be so small you can’t make out the character costume your selecting and that costume might end up blending in with scenery which doesn’t play well with a game where visual information is so important.
It feels like a lot of the unforgiving ideas at play in Unrailed! like the flawed save system and lack of checkpoints are specifically there to squeeze more blood out of this stone. The old adage that any game can be fun with friends is certainly in effect, especially since a well-coordinated group with the right mindset can trivialize some of the game due to its seeming lack of difficult increases proportional to the group size, but the foundations aren’t going to amuse more discerning players. Unrailed!’s small amount of content is stretched thin as it tries to use difficulty as a substitute for interesting action, so while the premise of building a railroad to prevent a train from hurtling towards its doom sounds compelling, Unrailed! goes off the rails because of the flawed concepts it chooses to build its framework upon.