Station Manager

This is probably a 6/10. TL;DR: Fun if you like watching tiny hoomans and other creatures moving around (ghosts shopping for veggie lmao). It's the type of semi-idle game that you leave it run on your second-screen since most of the time you are just gonna wait around for things to happen. There's not much about trains to speak about, since you are managing the station, not the trains. Trains are only there to get more customers to show up and use the shops you place in the station.
While I enjoyed playing in it, the game is sloooooooow. The money is earned in a roundabout ways. Basically, you have to wait till the end of the day to collect (1) super tiny amount of money from the shops if the get enough usage (2) rent from the shops. After a business year, you have an option to move on and develop a new station, or stay at the current one. If you develop a new station, at the end of the day, you also get 40% of what you earn from the previous station(s) plus whatever you earn from the current station. So, the more station you have, the more passive income you churn out. But again, it's sloooooooooow coz the cost of expanding will increase every time you upgrade the station, and there will be a point where you just have to sit around and wait for a few in-game months before you get to upgrade something else. Shops level up are also another annoying thing, since it's pretty much RNG-based. For instance, sandwich store requires inspector-type of customer to use that store a number of times before it can level up. And you have no control over who would use the store. You can try increase customers number, or use special items (that costs those "light bulbs" that is also take forever to accumulate). Building, researching, expanding will take in-game time, unless you use the "silver coins" to speed things up, which take even looooooonger to accumulate. In away, this game feels like it's a F2P/P2W kinda mobile game but since we've already paid for the game upfront, the only way to win is to grind & wait 🙄

Opening Remarks
In this train station themed grid-builder, Station Manager has all of the common traits of a Kairosoft title: charming pixel graphics, cute character designs, and tons of messages and popups to click through.
I recommend Station Manager because it's fun seeing hundreds of customers swarming to my station in nicely designed trains, roam around it, and buy stuff in various shops and stores whilst making random comments.
General Summary of Game
The main objective is to make your customers happy as they use various facilities in your train station so that you can gain money, research points, and coins as well as complete missions/goals.
Research unlocks are tied to meeting certain goals as to make them available to you. Money, research points, and coins are used to obtain various unlocks (customers, facilities and trains) to better your station.
Facilities are built on a grid system, so there is some planning on where facilities should be placed to better maximize the limited space of your train station. To help encourage thoughtful building, a combo system exists in which certain types of facilities boost/diminish the stats of other facilities.
You are only allowed to develop one train station at a time per one in-game year. So, after each in-game year, you are given the choice to open up and develop a train station in another area or to continue developing your current train station's area. Any progress from previously developed stations are kept saved if you decide to come back to those stations.
And with all that, as you progress through the years, you'll gradually amass more customers, more facilities, and more trains in your journey of making popular train stations with hundreds of customers coming to them.
Positives
Pixel graphics are excellently designed - characters, buildings, trains, maps are all quite pleasant to look at.
Plenty of unlockables to discover and research
Humorous dialogue and text at times
Negatives
Pop-up messages frequently disrupt gameplay
Repetitive music (I didn't mind it too much, but I thought this can be a potential negative for some)
Can be a bit grindy; some research unlocks require lots of time to achieve their goals normally or require hundreds of coins if you wish to unlock early.
Closing Remarks
I suggest to buy Station Manager during a sale since many Kairosoft games often end up going on sale time after time. Anyway, I hope you'll enjoy Station Manager like I did if you decide to get it one day.

It's not what I was expecting, but it's still a very good tycoon game.

10/10, Kairosoft and trains. Fun relaxing game, I enjoy being able to swap between stations at the end of a year, and daily missions are a nice touch.
Fun to leave idle to watch the little people going through my station while I do other things on my pc

Kairosoft has done it again! Terrific fun and very wholesome