Sweet Transit Review

Sweet Transit, recently released from the bowels of early access, seemed like it would be the sort of game that I'd find right up my alley, being a proud train and transport appreciator. However, it has some crucial flaws that prevent it from being as good as it should be, and fundamental issues with the progression make it difficult to muster the courage to play through it. To start with the good, it dispenses with the convenience of letting trains turn around anywhere the please. Instead, a train must be turned around, via some kind of dedicated infrastructure. Other options are possible, of course. Later trains have reverse gears, allowing them to go one way and then the other, without using turnaround infrastructure, or one could double head the trains, at the cost of more expensive maintenance. The production lines are interesting and varied, as well. Almost everything else, however, seems like a bad decision. Unlike TTDs challenging and varied terrain, which makes construction somewhat frustrating at times, there is nought but flat ground in this game. There are some hints at terrain, specifically water and mountains, but your trains cannot go up mountains, as terrain is strictly 2d. Presumably, had I played more of the game, the would be tunnels to unlock, which would go through mountains, but I didn't get that far. There is a complicated system of workers and work assignments. You can use trains to move workers to distant industries, as industries need workers to function. Unfortunately, while this system is interesting and fun, the game will start complaining if you build more workers shacks than you can provide full employment for. This ties into the game's most central problem, which is that there is no natural progression. Instead, everything you unlock is tied strictly to the number of workers you have, and if you need more workers, you need to manually build houses for them. This requires logs. There is no research tree, no immigrant attraction. Just build more houses. Maybe there's limits to how many houses you can build, but as previously mentioned, if you're only building enough houses to get to the next step in the tech tree, you'll quickly discover that you've got too many unemployed workers, which may do something to reduce demand for housing, though it never seemed to do much. Another major issue is that this game is sorely lacking in overview cowtools. There's no way to see rates of goods transported by lines, or even a summary view of lines, or global resource production/consumption. You always have to find the building on the map, and check there to see the rates of that specific building. If you want a better game in this vein, I instead suggest Workers and Resources.

@arseupwrongo