Pocket Trains: Railroad Tycoon

I love playing this game, but it has several issues that I find so frustrating that at times I am tempted to delete it and just move on to something else. 1) You work like crazy to earn crates that contain engine parts so you can get more capable engines. But, about 40% of the crates turn out to be parts for the “steamers” which are the least capable engines and since you don’t need them, you either just stack them up in a yard or sell them off for peanuts. 2) I have also lost many crates just dropping them in a switching yard only to have them disappear when another train tries to recover them. 3) The map does not scroll. So, although you can build a track across the entire Atlantic Ocean from Lisbon, Portugal to New York City in the United States, you cannot go across narrow distance from Alaska to Siberia. This game has been out since 2013 and I’ve been playing it since 2014. About two years ago it just disappeared and I lost everything - including lots of engines and routes that I paid real money for. The customer service folks tried to help, but I could not get the game restored. After a year off, I reinstalled and started over - because it really is fun, but although there are some new features, it still is kind of basic and glitchy. I’m still playing, and occasionally paying real money to improve my rail empire, but you might think twice before getting involved in this.

Dear developers I have been playing the game for awhile and everything is quite perfect, although I really think that the game would be even better if added different time setting, some may agree as well. I have always thought that the afternoon setting was cool but became a boring setting after awhile; not trying to be unappreciative. Now I know there are limits to what you developers can do. However I think adding elements like different time or weather setting like nighttime, dawn, dusk can really add something special to your game. In addition headlights for the trains would be fantastic to give that aesthetic feel at night. I’m not sure if the team had abandoned the game. Surely not, but I would love to see some updates. Not only to improve your player experience but your game infinitely. Feel free to reply, as I want and wish the best for your games. As a genuine player, I thank you.

I like this game so much that I have completed all the achievements including the Main Event, which takes a minimum of 100 day’s to complete. Completely by accident, Pocket Trains has taught me more about World Geography than I ever learned in school or thereafter. It’s fun collecting the different trains and trying to built the most efficient network that maximizes profits (time, distance/fuel, value of goods and ease of handing off cargo from one line to another are all considerations). It’s a nearly perfect experience with one frustrating exception: trains breaking. Your trains break occasionally, requiring either game coins or existing parts to fix them. Continuing to run them broken not only slows them down by as much as 80%, they also break more (require more coins to repair) each time you run one without fixing it. Do trains break in real life? Yes, of course. But it’s not FUN spending hard-earned coins or parts to fix something you are powerless to prevent. And that’s a big part of the problem: there is no gameplay mechanic that allows you to avoid your trains breaking, so it does nothing to introduce an element of strategy or skill. It is simply a tax imposed on you for playing the game, which is infuriating. The more lines you have, the more frustrating this gets. With 31 trains going all over the world, I could count on an average of four being broken every time I logged in to check on things and play another round. Even though I was able to accumulate all the trains and fuel cars and amass more than 10,000,000 coins — meaning the “tax” doesn’t make it impossible to build a fortune, it is still a “2 steps forward, one step back” experience that saps the joy from playing. Some trains cost as much as 7,500 coins to fix, which negates all their previous profit from turns since the last repair. Get rid of that aspect, and this game would be pretty much flawless.