Bounty Train

I was in the mood for a complex deep game that had building elements that mattered. I could not find anything to fit the bill anywhere. I picked this up on a whim and when I first tried it I thought it was a simple transport simulator. Wow was I wrong. This is a deep rpg with skill trees that matter. A variety of tactics are used depending on your situation, whether you have passengers/cargo or not. You can even try to outrun enemies. The game got deeper the more I played and building up your train is addictive. You can go with a slow lumbering tank or a light and fast set up. The upgrades you can have on your train really make it feel like a home base you care about. There is even a story mode where your choices can really change the tide of war. Right now the game is extremely difficult, which I consider a bonus. It took me three restarts to figure out the best strategy. Money is tight in this game and you get attacked often. It would be better with a difficulty adjuster. Like I said, strategy is important and you can replay battles. Do you keep your passengers safe or sacrifice them for an advantage? Is it worth it to put someone on the machine gun or to fight them hand to hand? Right now there are four factions. I do wish there was more enemy variety but I haven't finished the game yet and haven't even played with the cannons yet. I just won my first bakery in an auction and hope to buy another caboose so I can hire four more fighters to add to my team of five right now. No more transporting cotton to Cleveland for me! Oh and there are random side quests and encounters you can pick up which can hurt or help you. In closing this is a very difficult game but lots of fun when you get the hang of it. I highly recommend it as a base builder rpg. It's still in development but well worth the money now. I look forward to more content and would buy dlc if they add the wild west.

Its 2018 now and dispite complaints at release, the game still is way too unbalanced to enjoy. Some quests you have to fight like 25 well-trained and uber armed enemies vs 4 (the 4 being you) from both sides, while hardly being able to move around. The only way to continue is either win the fight, which is almost impossible wnt even after 10 enemies killed you run out of pots and explosives, or survive for 15 minutes, which is even harder given the massive amount of enemies. And thats's at "normal" difficculty. The devs promised to balance the game but apparently they abandoned it instead.

...and for the most part I do but the combat takes directly from 4.5 to 2 because while the storyline, the trading and the trains are really fun, the combat is so horrendously bad that it kills my enjoyment of the game. The developers should simply remove that aspect of the game and give us more trade. Then it'd be a fun game. I really cannot stress enough just how bad the combat system is in this game.

The current version I recently bought in a weekendsale is pretty fun. Which, I have to say, surprised me after reading some reviews from earlier. I pretty much bought the game simply out of the fact that it wasn't that expensive and made by "Deadalic Entertainment", who's products I very much enjoy. And I was surpised by a fun albait a little repetetive game. So, what is Bounty Train? It's basically a hybrid of a easy streamlined Railroad-Tycoon and a light RPG. You are a son, inheriting your fathers railroad-shares in america. You instantly set out to be a goody-two-shoes and take over the majority of shares to stop the native american genocide - I know, quite the goal - You do this by unlocking railroadtracks and then useing those connections between preset citys to trade goods from one city to the other. The economy, as far as I could tell, is determined randomly at the start of the game, meaning that citys never change their products. This means that a worthwhile traderoute is allmost allways static. There are some other factors by which the economy changes, but they are rather temporary. So yeah, the economy is rather simply and not comparable to more in-depth titles of the railroad/logisitc-tycoon genre, but they are still fun to exploit. You frequently find yourself checking the cityhalls for interesting contracts, optimizing your limited traincapacity and planing out which route you take, what and where you buy and sell goods on that route. It's a fun gameplay-loop. What are the RPG-elements? Well, on your way to become a proper Railroad-Tycoon, you need trainguards. Those stay with you and level up. Same as your Charname. They have stats, skills and perks. You can equip them with items and weapons and they are used in the Combat/Minigames. Combat in itself is very simple and in my opinion to worthwhile. I for example run a genocidal deathtrain up and down, killing every indian and bandit, to level up. It's serviceable. There is also a sandboxmode