Games check: Sweet Transit – Everything has to go on the rails – News

The construction game started on July 28th sweettransit in Early Access on Steam. In the title, you start with a small settlement that aims to grow into a thriving city. The needs of your residents are constantly growing and so that everyone is happy and satisfied, it is important to bring in goods and goods of ever higher quality. The only transport option available to you is the railway. As a regular user of this means of transport, I ask myself: can this work?

Industrial plants may not be in the catchment area of ​​your main building and will be “outsourced”.

The beginning needs to be well planned

At the beginning of the game you place the warehouse, a very important node. This is where you deliver basic raw materials such as wood and whetstones. The warehouse then automatically distributes these resources to your settlements. You have to organize the distribution of other goods such as coal, the fuel for your trains. During the course of the game, the trick is to maintain the cycle of goods, to adapt it to the required quantity and to the needs of your residents.

Then you look for a place for the village community center, the heart of your settlement. You then build residential buildings, water towers, fishing ports and warehouses using building game-proven rectangular constructions and connect each building with a road. Of course, the train stations and the track system are very important: This is the only way your workers can get to the outsourced industrial plants and the desired goods to your settlement.

The placement of the important buildings is subject to strict rules: the village center and the warehouse need a large distance from each other, and all industrial sites must also be outside of their catchment area. Sweet Transit takes a game-mechanically understandable approach here, after all I’m supposed to set up a transport system. However, the design decision also forces me into a constructed, unnatural scenario.

The district of Lippstadt Süd still has room for development and currently offers the residents in the catchment area too few jobs – which makes them dissatisfied.

Pleasure and frustration in everyday construction work

Your route network will soon be full of trains with different loads and destinations that need to be coordinated. In the free game – I only played this mode for this check – you always unlock new building options after reaching specified milestones. Installing this as elegantly as possible into the existing system is fun.

To ensure that there is no or as little chaos as possible on the rails, Sweet Transit provides you with a signal system. This divides routes into sections and regulates access and transit. Unfortunately, even after 13 hours of play, I still didn’t understand how this system works. The tutorial tries to make the basic principle understandable with the help of clear signal puzzles. But I can’t transfer the abstract puzzles to concrete situations in the game world.

The route planning looks quite simple at first glance, but the function of the individual stopping conditions in connection with the “transport goods” is not explained anywhere.

Another annoyance is the operation of the interface: many functions in the menus remain unexplained. And when a plan doesn’t work, an order doesn’t get carried out, I mostly searched in vain for the reason. So besides playing, I spent a lot of time in the Steam help area and with external guides. I hope that the developers will revise the in-game interface and some controls over the course of Early Access, structuring them more clearly and explaining features better.

Despite Early Access, Sweet Transit has been running stably so far, but not without errors. To be honest, it was often not clear to me whether the problem was due to my specifications or whether it was a bug. It was clearly due to the game, however, when a train suddenly no longer carried out the transport specifications and as a result my entire production collapsed. Fortunately, a restart fixed the problem. The scope is currently still manageable: In addition to the tutorials and the free mode, you currently only have one scenario available with Paris.

My most successful route network so far at a glance.

The train can

After three hours of play I was fed up and annoyed by Sweet Transit. Something was always not working as planned. I missed comfort and clarity everywhere. Despite everything, I had fun planning and building the route network, expanding my settlement and the incentive to integrate new building options into my system. With the help of the Internet, self-imposed patience and after several restarts, successes came and my (clear) fleet of locomotives ran reliably.

For now, I think I understand Sweet Train. I think I know how it works. With the exception of the signal system, only trial and error helps me here – at least sometimes. However, I know that I have limited logical thinking skills and I fear that Sweet Transit will soon show me my limits. Because the title enables complex solutions in the smallest space with the signal system and I assume that as the game progresses it will become more and more important to find the most effective solutions.

Which could mean that the construction part is still the game element that brings progress, but solving the logic puzzles in and around the transport network will be the real challenge. In my opinion, Sweet Transit is already working very well on this level. So that the start is less bumpy, the developers will hopefully tackle the construction site interface and player guidance in the course of Early Access.

• Building game in Early Access for PC
• single player
• For advanced and professionals
• Price: 21.99 euros
• In one sentence: Challenging development game in Early Access that relies entirely on the railway as a means of transport.