Train Sim World 2 (2020)

Playing the 2nd part of the rush hour expansion, nahverkehr dresden, i gotta say this one is pretty good. There's a lot of different locos, which makes the gameplay somewhat varied, and the scenery looks pretty nice. I also like that there is both freight and passenger on this route.

There's still a lot wrong with the game though, for example, the passenger jumping bug is not yet fixed on ps5 and quite often you have to do a restart procedure for no reason cause the train randomly decided to activate it's emergency procedure. These bugs are quite annoying and i wish they would fix them before adding more dlc's.

I don't know how other players think about this, but i also wish the routes were more connected in some way. I mean, for nahverkehr Dresden for example, there's like 140 routes in the timetable, but they are pretty much all the same. 120 of them are just driving between Dresden and Riesa in either direction, and frankly, after doing that 5 times i've kinda seen the deal. How fun would it be if you could ride all the way from munich to berlin or dortmund if you own the routes in between, and make all kinds of variations of routes in between all those cities.

Playing the PS5 version, with the rush hour DLC which currently adds one area, with 2 more down the line. This game was recommended to me by a friend, i never really play any simulation type games, but i have to say this one surprised me. It's very relaxing after a work day to just sit around and drive some trains or metro's. Each environment is very different from the other ones in scenery and vehicles that you can drive. There are tutorials for each train / metro type (more on that below at the negative points), a scheduled mode and a free mode for each area.

Now to the negative, so far:

• The 'beginner' tutorial repeats for each new area you go to, even if you completed it in another area already, which gets really annoying at a certain point. Yes, I've played for 40 hours, i think i know at this point how to enter a train and that a red signal means don't drive past ;)

• The rest of the tutorials, for vehicle specific explaining, are often very lacking and incomplete. They do explain the basics of each train/metro but more often than not leave you pondering and eventually googling what you did wrong, for example in the startup procedure of a train where it just failed to mention certain steps.

• The walking mode seems pretty unneeded to me, you have to place objects like posters around the stations and just walk around a bit, which would have been fun if you could actually go into the environments, but each station has hidden barriers that you can not pass. To get the trophies you also have to place an obscure amount of items around the route. Just seems like pointless game filler.

• There are a LOT of areas, but.. just not in the base game. It ships with 3 areas, which seems kind of limited for a full priced game. The DLC areas you can buy are 30 euros each, and then you can also buy additional trains for each of the areas, at another steep price. Seeing the rate at which they put out said DLC's, it leaves you wondering if they could not have added some more of them to the base game, as it reeks a bit of milking the game this way.

• There are quite a few bugs, at least in the ps5 version. Sometimes a green light will just suddenly turn into a red one when you are 2 meters in front of it at full speed, and penalize you for passing it. Also the doors will sometimes not close properly, where the game says they did, but you can't start the train because the doors are still open. The loading/unloading animation of passengers often glitches out and you see a pile of jumping passengers in the door, which looks really silly.

Overall it's a decent game, and a nice way to relax. But the negative points really bring down the experience quite a bit.