Railbound

TLDR: The game is technically very competent. But I did not receive the same enjoyment as I did from their first two games. Does that mean I only like easy puzzlers? Was it too long? It's hard to tell. I ultimately will give this a thumb's up, but please read below for the full opinion. This game was played in its entirety on a MacBook Air M1 8gb ram 7c gpu running MacOS Sonoma. There were no bugs or crashes throughout my time with the game. All achievements unlocked at their appropriate times. This is a tough one. I don't know how to review this. To begin with, most of the "essentials" (graphics, animations, sound, music) are very high quality, which is typical from this dev. I cannot find one thing to fault here. The story is as useless and unimportant as it is in their previous two titles. You will forget about it while playing it and never think about it again. The UI gets a slight ding, as it's difficult to know what all of the buttons mean. Why does a wrench mean level editor, but a shovel means credits? I can't find the meaning there... I should also point out that this is the third game (more or less in a row) that I have played from these developers. I mentioned in both of my previous two reviews (both positives) that the game was a bit too easy and I wished for more difficulty. Well, I got what I asked for, but did I want it? Simply put, the game is too hard. I think I'm pretty good at puzzlers, but for some reason, train puzzles always make me struggle the most. I had similar issues with Galaxy Express, though that felt much more accessible than this game. Not only does this game have more than three times the puzzles of their previous two games (so you've got the quantity!), but these are also far, far harder. Too hard, I would say. I breezed through worlds 1-7 (including bonus levels) without too much trouble. Then came World 8. It didn't have the worst puzzles, but the puzzles were not good, AND it has the worst color scheme in the game. It's purple on purple. It hurt my eyes fairly quickly. I soldiered through that world. World 9 was a treat. Back to hard but not fiendish difficulty puzzles, and you felt good when you completed them. World 10 through 12 will possibly be the levels that decide the thumb. They are pretty universally terrible levels. The limitations (no four-way crossing, minimal pieces, set pieces) that nudged you towards a solution before, are only here to hamper you now. Most of the time I felt as though I lucked into a solution without even being able to see it. And it likely is (on the occasions I did not have to consult a guide) the exact same solution that everyone else was forced to make. No creative puzzle-solving in these levels! I don't feel as though the previous puzzles set me up for success. Yes, they did teach certain concepts: where to hold a train, how to have them criss-cross, how to invert them, and so on. But really none of these concepts can be translated to any future puzzle, because of the huge limitations in place. TLDR: The game is technically very competent. But I did not receive the same enjoyment as I did from their first two games. Does that mean I only like easy puzzlers? Was it too long? It's hard to tell. I ultimately will give this a thumb's up, but I hope you have read enough and understood the dilemma my rating here has.

I think this to be the weakest of Afterburns four games that are currently out (Golf Peaks, Inbento, Pup Champs). Where the other games feel like solving a puzzles backwards with deductions based on possible positions, this game feels often very simple or very confusing and frustrating. There is a timing/counting aspect to some of the puzzles, and when the numbers become too high and too spread out to think about, you end up brute forcing your way through the puzzles until it works. One of the levels, you have to put all the tracks in a circle and switch the levers to make a bunch of separate cars do their own loops in a specific sequence that I still don't understand in hindsight. I swear to god I watched a car go in a circle 8 times and somehow that was the solution. Without the timing and counting, it's pretty easy to just lay the tracks in the right spots. There's no way to skip the hard levels and come back either, you just get trapped in these puzzles sometimes, which is bad when they feel like random nonsense. Do I hate difficult puzzles? Am I stupid? Is Railbound objectively less good than afterburns other games? Hopefully someday science will be able to answer these questions. Until then, we have steam reviews. I leave a thumbs up because I like the first few areas, but those later areas really hurt to play through. I feel more mixed than positive about Railbound.