Station to Station Review
Summary: Station to Station is the train themed puzzle game you've been looking for! Build stations in this ever growing world and test your forward planning skills.
4.3
Choo-Choo!
Station to Station is more than just a railroad management game, it’s a puzzle game that will put your forward planning skills to the test. Your job is simple, build railroads and stations to allow goods and passengers to go where they’re needed. A simple concept, but don’t be fooled by it’s beautiful graphics, this is not as easy as it looks!
Overview
As far as puzzle games go, Station to Station stands out from your typical railroad management game thanks to its simple, yet unique take on the genre. If you were to imagine a game where your goal was to build a network of stations and railroads to deliver passengers and goods across the map, I’d guess that most of you would expect a highly complex system of timetable and resource management, with railroads spanning thousands of kilometers. However, Station to Station is very much the complete opposite, every tedious micromanaging aspect of your typical train sim has been stripped away, leveling an extremely fun and challenging puzzle game. If anything, Station to Station might look like a railroad sim, but underneath it all, it’s a very simple concept, done extremely well.
Beyond its beautiful vortex-pixel, railway-themed facade, Station to Station is ultimately a puzzle game that cleverly uses train stations as its focal points, weaving a delightful challenge into every level. As you progress through the game, you’ll explore six distinct biomes, each brimming with five or six progressively trickier levels. Players are tasked with strategically connecting various factories, mines, farms, and cities, to each other, allowing the transporting of goods between locations. For example, a mine producing iron ore will need to be connected to a location that produces steel, which in turn needs to be connected to a factory producing tools. Each location will either produce or require resources to be delivered, with some locations producing and/or receiving multiple types of resources such as cities. The tricky part of the game isn’t so much about ensuring that each location is connected, but rather managing the cost of building railroads.
Stations can only be built near a resource but only allow for four different train lines to be connected, making forward planning a key element to completing each level. At the start of each level, players are given a small amount of cash to start building their train network, with railroads costing per meter of track and a base fee per station. The cheapest method is to build railroads on flat ground, but the option is to build bridges and crossings at an additional cost. The good news is that as long as two stations are inadvertently connected via the same network of stations and railroads, resources can be delivered to any point, meaning that you can save money by daisy chaining locations together.
At first, gameplay feels quite easy, and most people will breeze through the first dozen levels in just a few hours. It isn’t until later levels that the brain strain starts to kick in, and anyone who, like me is a perfectionist, and wants to keep their track record of acing each level, is going to start racking their brains trying to figure out clever strategies to pass each level. Just as soon as you feel you’ve successfully mastered a new puzzle element such as the ‘X crossing’ or the best ways to use the ‘heavy freight train’ score bonus card, Station to Station throughs out a new challenge to keep you on your toes. In later levels, you’ll start seeing new challenges that really test your forward planning skills, changing the game from an easy game a 5 year old would beat in 5 min, to something that will take over an hour to complete, only to realize that you were just short of that perfect score and need to try again. I know I’m not giving much away in terms of what kind of puzzles you’ll be facing but I think that’s part of the fun of Station to Station, you really don’t know what you’re going to be up against next.
When it launched, Station to Station only had 5 worlds available for players to test their brains on, but since then, the team at Galaxy Grove have been hard at work developing even more content, even teaming up with 2 Star Games to bring the demon spider-train himself, Choo-Choo Charles into the game, giving players the ultimate, yet cutest nightmare crossover you could imagine! Galaxy Grove has big plans for Station to Station, which will give gamers ample reasons to come back and keep playing, time and time again.
Final Thoughts
Station to Station has come a long way since the demo and it’s clear to see that the team at Galaxy Grove have big plans for the game. I’m quite impressed by just how challenging Station to Station is, and highly recommend any gamer looking for a good (but not impossible) challenge to give this game a red-hot crack. Even if the puzzles stump you, the graphics alone will make the headache worth it, especially when you watch a spider-train crawl its way around the map!
About the Author
John Werner Web Designer by day, Gamer by every other hour. No game is too big or too indie for this gamer. I review from the heart and an open mind. Every game is worth giving a go!
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