Trackline Express

by Aethyna Jun 30, 2024 | 1 Votes | 59 Played | 0 Reviews

8 rate

Genres:

Action

Graphics:

Labels:

Survival , Co-op , Roguelike/roguelite , Trains

Platforms:

Publishers:

Bubblebird Studio Trackline Express is a hectic co-op game where you try to escape from a menacing wildfire hot on your tail in an old locomotive. In your escape, you’ll also pick up new passengers along the way, with each hopefully contributing to help keep the locomotive moving to the next station. Will you be able to make it to the end? Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Gameplay Community Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Trackline Express is a hectic co-op game where you try to escape from a menacing wildfire hot on your tail in an old locomotive. As you travel across the lands, you’ll get to gather the resources you need to craft new carriages, add defenses to protect your train from hostiles, and even upgrade your locomotive so you could move faster. In your escape, you’ll also pick up new passengers along the way, with each hopefully contributing what they can to help keep the locomotive moving to the next station. Will you be able to make it to the end?

Gameplay

Trackline Express has a gameplay that’s pretty similar to one of my favorite co-op games of all time, Unrailed. Here, you’ll work with your buddies – or alone, you do you! – to gather resources from your train’s surroundings and use them to either fuel your locomotive or to craft into something more useful like a tool (your character can equip up to two different kinds, along with a weapon) or a storage unit.

The main resources you’ll need include coal, which you’ll need to fuel, well, almost everything from the locomotive to the furnace, but you’ll also need wood, rock, and eventually iron if you are to craft weapons or upgrade your locomotive. There’s even a way to speed up the resource gathering if you tap on the boost key when the option pops up on screen.

Although technically you can gather resources from anywhere on the map, there’s a little caveat – the game has some sort of “fog of war” that will greatly harm your characters (also known as Passengers in this game) if they venture into it. The only way to safely collect items that are located in this “fog of war” is by placing and building parcels. These will not only open up areas previously shrouded by this damaging fog, but it’ll also extend the field of your vision, allowing you to see further. That said, you can’t build parcels too far ahead, or behind, your train.

I should probably point out as well that gathering resources costs water. Each passenger in this game has a 20 water capacity and if it’s completely drained, they will start automatically take health damage until they have more water or if they die. You can replenish the water you need to keep going from a variety of means, but that also depends on the biome you’re in. Naturally, it’ll be a lot harder to find water or water sources in the desert as opposed to the meadows.

Aside from your starter coal storage, you don’t really have storage space for anything else… that is unless you unlock the blueprints for the different storage units for each of the resources you can gather. In fact, you won’t be able to build anything unless you first unlock the blueprint first. Once done, you’ll then be able to add the materials needed to build it – whatever it is. Not everything can be affixed to your train too. Many of them, ranging from the furnace to the piggy bank where you can hoard coins, require a flatcar to haul them along.

You’ll also need to build wagons which you’ll need to rescue the many people stranded at various train stations along the way. This isn’t optional, however. If you do not rescue them, your train won’t be allowed to depart from the station. Once you get to the mid-game, you’ll even be able to generate electricity and use it to power various machines from oil derricks to electric water pumps, automating some of the crucial processes that will help keep your train, and people, going.

To spice things up further, Trackline Express throws quite a bit of challenges your way to constantly keep you, and your team, on your toes. This can range from wildfires to barbarian attacks, to even ambushes where waves of enemies will swarm your position, trying to take your train apart. This is where the defenses you can build comes in. You can set up turrets and watchtowers and have your passengers attack these enemies with various crafted weapons like crossbows and spears, all to stop them from destroying your train.

Each segment of the train has durability and if it’s depleted, the segment, such as the wagon, will disintegrate or in some cases, completely decimated, such as in the case of the flatcar… and no, you don’t get your resources back. If you have the wrench crafted, you can spend precious energy – I mean, water – to repair your damaged train.

Injured passengers, on the other hand, can be healed by consuming food, but food can be hard to come by so it’s often best if you don’t get them injured in the first place. Note that if you’re playing the game solo, you can easily switch between passengers by pressing the Tab button… though, there’s no need to do that to get your passengers to attack an enemy since passengers who have weapons will automatically engage enemies if any is detected nearby.

From time to time, you might get some help from the game in the form of a rain cloud, which will re-hydrate your passenger if he manages to collect the droplets as they fall from the cloud, or a market where you can sell anything you have that you don’t need for coins. At the end of the day, you’ll learn from your mistakes from the previous runs and set off on a new run in an attempt to reach the end of the game. Eventually, you might just make it!

Trackline Express is, without a doubt, a fun game. It manages to capture the chaotic co-op gameplay inherent in similar games within the same genre. However, there’s one little bit of bone I have to pick: I think it’s a bad idea to make the locomotive completely destroyable. In my second playthrough, my locomotive was destroyed and I don’t have the resources – which can be pretty hefty – to build a new one, essentially dooming my run.

Instead, it's probably better to have it to become damaged, much like the wagons, so the players can repair the locomotive and won’t find themselves stranded despite still having the resources to keep moving.

Community

Like most co-op-oriented games, Trackline Express is best played with friends. The game supports both online co-op and local LAN but your friends need to have a copy of the game for this to work since the game doesn’t support Steam’s remote play. There’s also a map editor in this game where you can create your own maps and share them to other players via Steam Workshop.

The only downside about co-op is the lack of character customization prior to entering a game. Everyone just look so similar here, that is unless you happen to find a wooden box with a fancy hat inside and equipped it. It’d be nice to have a bit more color options at least.

Graphics/ Sound

Trackline Express features an over-the-top cartoonish aesthetics that look a bit like doodle art, albeit one a-washed with bright vibrant colors, which frankly speaking help the game stand out from the other co-op titles. Couple that with the camera view, the game reminds me of another indie game, Cornucopia, which I also adored. In terms of sound, the game provides a pretty chill background tune that spans throughout the game, even when crazy things are happening on-screen like encroaching wildfires or bloodthirsty barbarians. Not sure why, but this brings to mind the disaster girl meme for me at least.

Conclusion

All in all, Trackline Express strongly reminds me of another game that I absolutely adored, Unrailed. It’s similar to the latter in many ways – the hectic co-op-oriented gameplay; the resource gathering and crafting, and the many challenges that you’ll have to overcome with your team, be it barbarians or wildfires – but it also has its own charm and challenges, making the game a wild ride of fun! So, if you’re a fan of Unrailed or any similar builder-style co-op games, you’ll definitely like this one. Check it out!

New Game Added: Trackline Express

by Aethyna Jun 30, 2024

Trackline Express is a hectic co-op game where you try to escape from a menacing wildfire hot on your tail in an old locomotive. In your escape, you’ll also pick up new passengers along the way, with each hopefully contributing to help keep the locomotive moving to the next station. Will you be able to make it to the end?