SimRail – The Railway Simulator

Disclaimer: I'm a real life train driver, so my opinion might be different from that of a casual gamer.
I for one, love this simulator. Rest assured, this is not a game, but a simulator. There are no "adventure" missions, no shooting, no score - you just drive a train. What sets this simulator apart from others, is that this is not all about eye candy.
It's very good to look at, mind you, but where this sim shines, is in physics and systems managing. Driving a train here isn't just about moving a lever forward or backwards. You actually have to know at least a bit about train systems, especially the brakes (and computers for ERTMS driving).
True, the sim isn't totally mature yet - the biggest gripe being the lack of single-player save, or checkpoints. But this isn't a sim you just play casually for a few minutes. If you start playing a sim like this, you expect to play for at least an hour or so. That's why the lack of save isn't a deal breaker for me.
In short, this is not a game but a sim; it's more focused towards physics and applying correct procedures, rather than zooming about in a pretty landscape; it has a steep learning curve but is very rewarding; the ability to play as a dispatcher instead of a driver, is a real boon; there are a few bugs/shortcomings, but they are more than compensated by the available features.

A lot of the positive and negative things have already been covered in other reviews, so I just want to talk about a few specific things I really like about this game:
- While the tutorials are indeed not well designed, the act of trying to figure out how the trains work myself with experimenting and doing web research was actually interesting and made the game more exiting for me (Nothing beats the experience of not being familiar with the ETCS system and having a failure while having an angry dispatcher and 3 other training drivers waiting for you to fix it)
- I am totally okay with the shallow single player and the devs not focussing on a save function. While this is annoying for people who like it, this game is really about the multiplayer mode. Each drive is unique, you never know what will happen and which signal will suddenly be red. Intercity Stuck behind a cargo train with 60km/h? Being re-routed over cargo tracks because the main way is crowded? Finishing a route on time feels much more rewarding when you are actually playing PvP against other drivers and the dispatchers. You can even have people on the tracks forcing you to emergency break... All this gives the game a really realistic feeling.
So for me this is kind of the Dark Souls of Train Simulators. Complicated, sometimes stressful. But if you succeed in understanding details of each traing, or you finish a route on time without using the HUD because of your skills, besides being delayed by multiple other late trains and helpless dispatcher, this is really a good feeling.
TLDR;
- complicated but rewarding
- you are forced to learn tons of things about real trains and train driving
- awesome multiplayer, meh single player (but people already started uploading custom scenarios)
- infinite replayability due to arbitrary, PvP-like nature of the game

---{ Graphics }---
☑ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audio }---
☑ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☑ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☑ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding
---{ Story }---
☑ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☑ 10
---{ Author }---
☑

After my first 3hours of play (apr-25) I normally do not write reviews. But already a lot of impressions are rolling in. ;)

The "thumb up" is mostly about "the impressive amount of work the developers have put into this game".
I mean 70GB of game data does not write itself.
And more routes are being built as I write this.



I love simulators, and the learning curve for this game is hard. Exactly how I like it. :)
BUT
As a non-speaking Polish player I get faced by tons of name tags in Polish. Which is fine -> It gives immersion.
But if the "hover-over-translation" is incorrect... and the narrator uses the wrong pronunciation... I get lost.

Maybe this review lands on one sentence: The experience is amazingly realistic, but got "lost in translation".

Although this can be fixed. I think the developers just got to caught up in doing it exactly right, fixing bugs etc, that the player experience got forgotten.
Hopefully a lot of players will buy the game, and another "GUI"/"Human-Interaction" expert could be hired into the team. Who knows, maybe I will find a bug-tracker just to give them what I found... still what I say: It can be fixed.


Main issue I have with this game is "control", meaning how to translate the knobs and handles on a train into a "controller used by a player".

A working gaming control is also very important these days. We players sit with "keyboard-mouse" or a "xbox controller" -> The devs need to give us some "forgiving slack" not being in the actual drivers cabin. And always give us the feeling we are "in control", even when using the 3rd person camera of the train. EVERY SINGLE INPUT must be possible to assign a key.

Example on "input problem" that happened to me during these first 3hours:
I am braking into a station, I am behind schedule, I am looking for the knob that unlocks the doors.
I click the unlock doors in "preparation to unlock" with a move of my mouse. I actually do NOT turn the knob into the "unlock left doors position". But the sensitive mouse must have twitched...
BAM: Punished. Points deducted for "running a train with doors unlocked"
I was under 10km/h and honestly: ANY train driver would "hold" his/her hand on the knob at that point if being late.
So big cudos to the 4.9% that got the badge "Perfectionist", because that means no penalties, not running late, nothing.



Reasons to play:
1) The training track for learning ETCS (European Train Control System)
One of the biggest reasons I bought this simulator, and is a good feature of the game.

But today (apr-25) there are (only) two training scenarios, and they are also very cumbersome to use.
ETCS is a big standard, and the game is trying to learn you a lot in a very short time frame, and in ONE compressed scenario.
I really think there is a need for some "skip" buttons.

Example from level-1 ETC training scenario:
If you fail (or just want to run it again), the (english) narrator intro can't be skipped, and each time a new instruction is given, the "focus" is changed, and the scenario is paused. You loose your own focus, and never get the chance to try what you learned in the training scenario DIRECTLY.

Again: This could be fixed by the developers.
I think these training scenarios should be "cut up" into smaller mini scenarios, where the narrator does the pausing etc. Maybe like short 5-10min scenarios for each thing that could happen in ETCS.

And then remove the narrator (and pause/zoom in) in the current ETCS training scenarios.
Which then could give me a chance to show if I understood everything.

2) Multiplayer
I still think the game shines in multi-player mode (the very short time I tried it, mostly watched youtubers do it)
But if you buying this game: Remember that you (at least) have to be able to make trains move. And game will not let you do multi-player unless you finish at least ONE tutorial (if you find it). And it could take time to get ready (for me 2hours).



So I will probably get used to the wonky GUI (that selects options just by letting your mouse hover over menu options), and learn how many taps my keyboard will need to do for each type of braking. But for now I don't think the game is fully "Polished" (get it?) for a new player, and want to give this feedback to new players, so that they get the "right expectations". It is not polished, but still an amazing game.


For the future I hope developers will "focus on what they have" before doing to many long routes.
Like possibility to run single engines with a mission to "remove trains that stopped" (both single player, and multi-player mode). The uniqueness in this game is the contact between players and operators, and with that the possibility to handle "the unexpected".
Or just give options to use the many side-tracks, to solve congestions around big towns.


And a last tip: Already without buying the game, the multi-player world is "vizualized" online on sites like:
So for players stuck on a red light, having that site in a separate window helps in "knowing" what is happening, unless an operator calls you up. :)
Really cool if you ask me, and in the future I hope to see stats from the train of stuff that are broken etc...

The best train sim on the market. Lovingly made, you can really feel it. There are however a few notable caveats:
- No saving and loading. This is less of an issue than you'd think, since multiplayer is most fun anyway.
- No routes outside of Poland. What is there is however so good that I don't mind. There are plans for expansion already too.
- Pricing on DLC has so far has not been great. It remains to be seen how competitively future content will be priced once the game exits early access.

I very much enjoy this game. Even though the game is still pretty new, it offers a lot of things to do. The dispatcher mode is well done and during busy times, you won't even have the time to do anything else than dispatching trains. When it comes to driving trains, you can choose from around 400 kilometers of tracks to drive on. From my point of view, the best part about the game is the multiplayer mode. I would highly recommend buying Simrail when considering a game about trains.

If someone would ask me, "Is there a cool game to drive trains?", I would answer "Yeah Train Simulator Classic by Dovetail Games"
But if someone was to ask me about one of the best developed and realistic simulators out there, my answer would have to be SimRail, myself being from Poland, everything this game has to offer is 1:1 with reality and features of each train.
Keep up the amazing work and lets hope the game continues to further develop as well as up until now