I don’t Choo-Choose you (★☆☆☆☆)
The game is pretty awful. Mercifully, it can be 100% completed in less than three hours.
Like many people said, it’s a meme game. The entire map just feels like copy-pasted stock assets of a derelict mining village. Ok, Choo Choo Charles looks great. As he should. He’s the whole point. Everything else is pretty terrible. Miniquests are just dumb busywork: “pickup all the loot in my barn” and the like. NPCs are all universally weird and ugly, but the dev thought giving them all “kooky” accents would make it less bad, somehow? Plus, the dev also thought making half of the game into a bunch of very weak stealth sections would make it better. It doesn’t. It’s the kind of stealth where you have no weapons and zero tools to help you figure out if you get seen and where enemies chase after you for a very, very long time.
Having your own little train as a moving base is kind of a cool concept. Sadly, the one thing the game should be doing well, train on train combat, doesn’t even work. I was attacked by the monster train all of three times. The first time I was pathetically underpowered, the other two times much too strong. Fighting the evil train looks cool in a Youtube video, but it’s really not interesting. There’s no real sense of the damage you’re causing, or any strategy. You shoot at it and you win and it fucks off. Or you die, perhaps because of insufficient shooting? You can switch weapons mid-fight, but to pick another weapon, you have to awkwardly walk around the train and look for it. People like to make fun of Resident Evil bosses with their big glowing weak spots, but those are there for a reason. Otherwise, you’re just shooting at a big bag of hit points.
Oh yeah, the train also popped out of nowhere while I was on foot and ate me. It didn’t feel scary, it felt pointless. So the best way to experience this game is probably to watch your favorite Youtuber play it for you. They will probably even act their best to pretend the game is actually awesome and scary!
Idle Thoughts 