Bounty Train

What is Bounty Train?
Genre: Strategy
Setting: Building a railroad company empire during the American Civil Wars in the 1860's
Difficulty: 4/10 - basically simple, but sometimes fights can be tough
Length: around 10 hours for main campaign only, up to 60 to unlock all achievements and complete all side quests
Mode: singleplayer campaign, singleplayer freeplay
Similar games: can't name any, sorry. But there are lots of train-centered games out there
What's good about Bounty Train?
- motivating campaign
- well implemented historic setting and characters of history - you meet Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain and others
- characters have a rpg system and can improve
- well designed economy
The negative aspects:
- not that much item variety
- heist fights sometimes tend to be tough, throwing up to 25 high-health enemies at you already in mid-game
- not many chances to develop income - you can buy factories at auctions, but you can't upgrade them afterwards
- not that much left to do after 1865, unless you go for the 1 Million Mile Achievement --> prepare for grindy times
Result (and summary for those who have no time reading):
Bounty Train really knows how to suck the player into the game. It's pretty easy to get into and delivers a well-written campaign and the opportunity to meet historic characters while you try to build a railroad empire. On your way to glory, you'll have to master several fights, and some of them can be tough, so make sure your crew is prepared. Unfortunately there's a lack of items, and some more side quests would have been good to reduce the grinding after 1865.
Total recommendation if you are into train or strategy games or those featuring the American Civil War.

A delightful game full of excitement and old west charm. Colorful graphs and crisp, clear sounds make it fun to play.
All tasks are doable. You have to figure out how to do them. Oh and then, there are the Bandits! They become harder as you level up.
Keep your character and your crew members leveled up and well armed. Buy new and better weapons for you and your crew. Buy Gatling guns when you see them in the market. Can't have too many of those Bad Boys! They will help keep your train safer and is not considered illegal by cities that ban weapons. (The Bandits may think twice when seeing Gatling guns sticking out of your train!...Maybe..OK probably not. But it's still a good idea to have them)!
Don't forget to keep watch on your train. Trade in and buy new as your train wears down. That'll help to keep your train at top peak and keep repairs costs down.
Keep an eye out for banks. Deposit money when you can. It'll acquire interest through time and come in handy when leveling up your train or find yourself in a pinch.
Hospitals are great for healing your crew and yourself. But if doing a mission during this time period, keep an eye on the time. You might want to press on to complete the mission first depending on distance. While you're in the hospital, it a good idea to get your train fixed during your hospital stay. Especially if it has been damaged during a skirmish. That will save you time in doing so.
Save your game frequently. Especially after hard missions or skirmishes with Bandits.
Truly one of the most addictive games I've played in a long time. Great job, Devs. This game ROCKS!

I bought this game very cheap and I expected a short, challenging and rogue-like game for a pastime. Something like "Faster than light" on trails. That wasn't the case. The game is surprisingly long. It took me 64 hours to finish the campaign and another 10 for the DLC.
Bounty Train starts challenging, gets motivating and fun along the way, but... the endgame is quite boring. When you have maxed out everything and just wait for "certain events" to happen so that you can finish the campaign.
The DLC is rather bad. As others have already pointed out, it's just a huge, tedious fetch-quest. Do yourself a favour and just get the basic game. Preferably when it's on discount.
During the game, whenever I unlocked a new train, it felt like an achievement. Upgrading weapons was rather optional. Once you got a bigger crew, the fights are rather easy. Upgrades for train and cabins/wagons are cheap, which is a good thing, because they wear down over time and have to be replaced after a certain amount of mileage or they'll keep breaking.
You can transport people, cargo, letters or go hunting for bounty - when there's an event for it. The events are somewhat limited. Could be more.
Driving the train in battles was a terrible experience. Even though some can easily run 150km/h in normal cases, in battles you keep getting curves that you have to drive as slow as 10~30 kmh, with an average of 20. If you are faster, your train and wagons get damaged. The faster you are, the more the damage.
Since I couldn't fight of bandits, reposition my team members and keep track of the speed and course ahead at the same time, I ended up driving at a default speed of below 10km/h during fights.

This is a cute little game primarily focused on trading between cities. You flip products by buying them low, selling them high. The entire goal is acquiring a majority of shares for your rail company.
The first half of the game is quite good. However, the game also outstays it welcome in the end. The beginning of the game throws new things at you at a rapid pace, and keeps you on your toes with deadlines that are just a little too soon to be comfortable. However, after gaining the last train engine and gathering a decent crew, the whole game becomes a push-over. You still have to gather over 20% of your shares at that point though, and doing so takes hours, mainly waiting for events to spawn that give them to you.
The game also has several bugs, including trains not being able to be driven in random encounters, enemies pathfinding way off the map in random encounters and taking ages to get back to the train. Enemies also move through the train on several occassions, and sometimes will never board the train and be just in perpetual boarding state. Enemies also tend to stack up on top of each other, as the spawning space is usually in range of your own crew. "Running" from enemies is also pretty much never an option. Your train is either not fast enough, or your train is so fast that you can't possibly slow it down enough for the stupid amount of bends in the track.
That said the game isn't too bad. I recommend only picking up the game when it is on sale, but then it is a decent enough amount of fun for your money.

Just finished the main game and thoroughly enjoyed it. Took four attempts to get going, as tried to be jack of all trades. If new to the game, make a decision from the outset what road to go down, trader, smuggler, fighter, bandit, entrepreneur and stick to it for the first 10-15 hours. You can then become a jack of all trades after this.
I found the game to be good entertainment and well worth the money at £3. The balance of the game is just right, once you get to the grips of the mechanics, making it challenging yet rewarding. Stick with it as you will die at the start a few times. It is well worth the first hours of failure.
Recommendation, if developers are reading, design a better tutorial, especially on how combat works, and this game would appeal to the masses. Looking forward to the next act, but for now will restart and play the game like Brian, and be a very naughty boy.

I want to think that this happens to other gamers as well. For some random reason, you end up playing a game nobody’s talking about and you get stuck. That was Bounty Train for me, a simple game that for still unknown reasons, sucked 15 hours of my life. Maybe its basic gameplay reminded me of a generic came I could have played in the 90s and i got nostalgic; maybe because it followed a simple risk/reward formula; maybe because I was just in the mood for a game where you drive a train around the USA during the 1860s, trading and doing transport or smuggling or combat missions to upgrade your train wagons, your companions and your equipment. Whatever it was that Korbie games did, kudos: it worked.

Bounty Train immediately shows itself for what it is : an economic management system with a strong role in terms of character advancement and combat mechanics, which behaves like a roguelike à la Convoy or FTL in the composition and administration of the eventual crew, without however, contemplate the recursion of the matches. In essence, permadeath exists, and once you have lost a companion, a brother or a passenger, you do not go back, but Walter must stay alive. On this rule, the mix of genres thought by Daedalic is grafted in an almost modular way and adapts to the way the player decides to live the experience : some aspects of the game, paradoxically, can also be totally ignored, and consequently , it can be approached Bounty Train as a combat-oriented RPG, or as a rail trade simulator, or even as a civil transport simulator. Obviously, the extremes, for the purposes of the campaign mode, make little (but they can be tested in that sandbox) and the best strategy is to optimize their trips based on the final goal, something that is certainly not obvious. The set of rules designed by Daedalic is simple, and in some ways reminiscent of a board game. Each locomotive has its own characteristics: a maximum weight that it can support by towing to be divided between compartments, cargo and passengers, and a parameter that regulates the consumption of a certain amount of coal. Around the complex concept of equilibrium of resources and components all journeys rotate and, depending on the circumstances, other determining factors are added: many routes need permits, others can be manned by bandits, while others can be discovered on the basis of quest. Cab be repetitive according to how you play. The end result is an overall fun and exciting experience, perfectly set in a very rigid framework that could turn someone's nose upside down and that, surely, sacrifices the depth of the individual dynamics in favor of a whole that knows how to be profound and rewarding. however overly complex.