I've played this for over 4 hours and can't make a profit. The tutorial teaches you basic mechanics (how to place a station, how to establish a line, etc), but does not actually demonstrate how to make a profit off of those lines. Each step in the tutorial rewards you for completing it, producing something of a greenhouse effect (for plants, not the atmosphere); you have thousands of extra dollars just from following the simple instructions the game gives you, and your system isn't actually tested for efficacy on its own. The bulk of the money you make in the tutorial is in these quest rewards. This is not a sustainable growth model in any other gamemode, and the tutorial inevitably ends, so the un-tested growth pattern you were following always fails. Quests give you lump sums after completion, which makes them attractive to pursue. There's almost no way you can keep the lines that were required to complete them profitable, though, so I find myself deleting those lines as soon as I get rewarded for them. In sandbox, you will frequently get quests to connect two distant buildings in *a single transit line*. From my understanding, this contradicts the game's basic function of rewarding complex networks which rely on passengers switching lines/modes of transit. Basically none of the lines that these quests suggest are profitable in and of themselves. It's not possible (that I have been able to find) to view the profit (+/-) from a given line. At one point in a San Francisco scenario, an NPC tells you he is the "governor" of San Franciso. That has never been a position that existed in all of human history to my knowledge.
Graphics are the biggest disappointment by far. As the camera switches in cutscenes, the game loads all the textures in from the disk again or something; I can't explain the texture pop-in any other way. I have the game on an SSD with an up-to-spec build but the quality pop-in is kind of distracting. Clearly delineated side quests are welcome, but re-tracing the entire route I took to do the side quest (typically without any new enemies to cut my teeth on) is kind of a bore. I would expect encounters like these to dump me back out onto the main path right after completing them, in the way a dungeon in TES: Oblivion almost always loops back on the entrance so you don't end up back-tracking. The levels aren't necessarily always designed well for the kind of enemy dancing I'm used to. I often find myself walking backwards into obstacles that shouldn't really be there. That said, it's got secrets! It's got one-liners! It's got weapons! It's got a diverse set of new, interesting enemies, as well as the classics you expect! What cutscenes are there are skippable (praise baby jebus, unskippable cutscenes are a war crime)! If you enjoy other entries, odds are high you will find something to enjoy here too. Croteam could be charging a full $60 in 2021 based on how other devs treat their customers, but it's already $40 at the time of this review.
