Trainyard can take a little while to pick up speed, but once you get used to laying down tracks, manipulating collisions, and timing your trains, you ‘ll be in for quite a ride on this $2 puzzler.
Presentation
When you get down to it, all you do in Trainyard is lay tracks and watch as trains roll right over them to their destinations, but it feels like so much more than that because of all the gorgeous menus, sound effects, and charming little details (like the fact that all levels are named after Canadian cities, which wins big points from this Canuck). It’s all showcased beautifully in this promo video:
The menu typography makes for a beautiful introduction to the game, and most every button glows and clicks just the right amount, which really brings the interface to life. From an app standpoint alone, Trainyard has already won big points with me.
Gameplay
The core mechanics of Trainyard ” laying and switching tracks, merging trains, and perfecting the timing of your layouts ” can take a while to get used to. There ‘s a lengthy tutorial that spans the first 20-30 levels of the game that tries to instil the basics into players’ heads. Certain levels can only take two or three seconds to finish, but the amount of repetition can feel like a set of textbook exercises instead of a game tutorial. I do appreciate all the effort developer Matt Rix placed on teaching proper Trainyard gaming habits, but I would also have appreciated an option to skip to the meatier (err, trainier) levels.
The objective on every Trainyard level is the same: send all your trains from one trainyard to another. There are starting and ending trainyards, and each one can differ in terms of colour and capacity, which forces you to get creative with the trains you have on-hand. Some levels are as simple as guiding red trains into red trainyards, while others require you to combined red and blue trains before leading them into a purple trainyard. Each map is placed on a grid, and you ‘re free to draw your tracks however you want, so there are usually multiple solutions to every level.
The game is completely frozen as you lay your tracks, and you have to hit a Start button to watch your trains run, like Lemmings, along the tracks to their destinations. Hitting Start serves as either the perfect execution of your Trainyard solution, or a live troubleshooting session, where you can work out the timing of your track design. I haven ‘t even mentioned how track switching or collisions work, but suffice it to say that reaching a successful Trainyard solution is always satisfying.
Conclusion
I haven ‘t yet finished Trainyard, but I think I ‘ve already played enough of it to judge that it’s well worth the $1.99 investment. It doesn’t quite have the polish of a Kieffer Bros. title (the trains look great, but the rocks look a little out of place), but it comes darn close, and has a charm all its own. Once you make it past the first sets of tutorials, Trainyard really opens up and becomes a much more challenging puzzle game, and the fact that many levels feature multiple solutions goes a long way towards making your particular solution feel all the more satisfying to reach. Finally, there’s the fact that $2 gets you a game with levels that are named after actual Canadian citi — nevermind. I’m the only one who finds that last bit exciting, aren’t I?
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Trainyard is available for $1.99 on the App Store.
The app was provided by Matt Rix for review on Just Another iPhone Blog. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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TAGS: iphone puzzle game
