Posted April 09, 2019
Note: This review is being posted here, as I would have to cut out too much for it to fit into the character limited review box. Comments are welcome.
Locomotion is supposed to be the sequel to Transport Tycoon. Instead, it is simply Transport Tycoon, but executed with worse ideas.
Firstly, I never once used a road vehicle in my many sessions. Their capacity is too poor, their speed is often pitiful, and dealing with a fleet of road vehicles seems like a good way to go mad. Busses were simply replaced by trams.
Pathing in this game is simply terrible. You'll often observe ships spinning in circles on the corners of the coast, and anything resembling an actual muli-lane railway may as well be forgotten. You might think waypoints could solve either of these, but surprisingly, this is not a good solution as players often find out that not only do players need to place upwards of 5 waypoints, but then repeat the route on the reverse, as well.
A massive issue with Locomotion is that there is no means to do maintenance on vehicles, nor any way to do a mass replace or retrofit. Reliability rots away too quickly, with the apparently implied suggestion being that every so often players need to stop players entire fleet and replace it on the spot. This is not a sane idea; as even with as few as five trains this becomes a chore, but also due to a quirk of the cargo system, any cargo in a train with an engine replaced will outright vanish. In the early game players will often be left waiting upwards of 10 years for a new vehicle, meaning players starter fleet is going to be running like absolute trash by the time upgrades occur.
The basic graphics are charming enough, clearly showing the basis of what would inspire the style of Roller Coaster Tycoon later. The problem rather is that most of the structures and buildings are pug ugly. With there only being 76 buildings total for cities and many of them aging out, and only 39 trees total, the visual variety quickly runs out, leaving players with a miasma of ugly offices and square block apartments. Those small numbers are supposed to cover 3 styles of architecture, by the way.
Landscape generation is foul. It explains why in the default set of scenarios, only four maps are randomly generated. No matter how players tweak the settings, players will never get a map that looks like a map, nor something which to make a sane transport network on. While Transport Tycoon's map generation was far from perfect, it generated something that resembled a map, rather than a series of overlapping rectangles. Further to this point, the industry placement in Locomotion is often a challenge to transport for, but in all the wrong ways. Logistically impossible, embedded in a landlocked mountain valley, or simply at two such distant points as to make attempts at transport infeasible. Often a combination of all three.
Many industrial issues would be lessened if the cargo flow of the game wasn't so brain fryingly insane. In most transport games, service begins when vehicles arrive, and only the cargo relevant to the service is readied. In Locomotion, service is assumed with as little as one station tile, and due to a glitch in the way cargo is handled, players may often end up with irrelevant cargo flowing over from other stations as if the entire cargo flow of the map was a liquid, passengers and mail sloshing into the coal route in the corner of the world, away from any city. However, in the realm of functioning as designed, getting cargo to an endpoint is not an easy task, especially in the early game.
Moving products into their respective industries is easy enough, but delivering finished goods (and mail) to early towns is nigh impossible due to the structuring of cargo acceptance. Goods are only accepted by certain buildings, and a station's catchment area has to overlap enough of them to produce a single demand. For mail, the problem is even more boggling, as while many houses produce mail, most won't start accepting mail until 10 years in from a 1900 start. Due to the aforementioned service issue, this means players can have piles cargo that's all dressed up with nowhere to go.
All of the issues mentioned in the previous two points would be far less of an issue if building a network wasn't such a click heavy pain. Locomotion uses the same exact building tools as Roller Coaster Tycoon, which are very ill suited to this purpose. Everything has to be built by the individual tile. Certainly, there are shortcuts to allow you to slap down multiple tiles, but this is only useful for very rare straightaways and worthless for anything else. I will say in favor of the interface that the menus pop open when hovered, but alas that is about all the positive to be said of the interface.
To a final point, Towns are a menace. When provided services, they can have explosive growth (literally off the chart, no less) and this can choke out infrastructure growth. Like most other systems in the game, town growth is fairly braindead, often resulting in a nongrid of too many useless roads and attempts to level the mountains and hills rather than building along them. Or tunnels to nowhere, when buildings are not built underground.
[During this review, I never once mentioned finances. This is because with the ease of generating money, it becomes quite useless as a marker of progress and due to an exponential inflation system, worthless as to telling players how much buying power they actually have.]
Overall, Locomotion makes for a poor showing, even for the release time, and does not hold up at all. However, there is great potential in the OpenLoco project to fix most of the issues I have mentioned in this review. Had it been released a decade earlier, it may have been an impressive iteration on Transport Tycoon.
Locomotion is supposed to be the sequel to Transport Tycoon. Instead, it is simply Transport Tycoon, but executed with worse ideas.
Firstly, I never once used a road vehicle in my many sessions. Their capacity is too poor, their speed is often pitiful, and dealing with a fleet of road vehicles seems like a good way to go mad. Busses were simply replaced by trams.
Pathing in this game is simply terrible. You'll often observe ships spinning in circles on the corners of the coast, and anything resembling an actual muli-lane railway may as well be forgotten. You might think waypoints could solve either of these, but surprisingly, this is not a good solution as players often find out that not only do players need to place upwards of 5 waypoints, but then repeat the route on the reverse, as well.
A massive issue with Locomotion is that there is no means to do maintenance on vehicles, nor any way to do a mass replace or retrofit. Reliability rots away too quickly, with the apparently implied suggestion being that every so often players need to stop players entire fleet and replace it on the spot. This is not a sane idea; as even with as few as five trains this becomes a chore, but also due to a quirk of the cargo system, any cargo in a train with an engine replaced will outright vanish. In the early game players will often be left waiting upwards of 10 years for a new vehicle, meaning players starter fleet is going to be running like absolute trash by the time upgrades occur.
The basic graphics are charming enough, clearly showing the basis of what would inspire the style of Roller Coaster Tycoon later. The problem rather is that most of the structures and buildings are pug ugly. With there only being 76 buildings total for cities and many of them aging out, and only 39 trees total, the visual variety quickly runs out, leaving players with a miasma of ugly offices and square block apartments. Those small numbers are supposed to cover 3 styles of architecture, by the way.
Landscape generation is foul. It explains why in the default set of scenarios, only four maps are randomly generated. No matter how players tweak the settings, players will never get a map that looks like a map, nor something which to make a sane transport network on. While Transport Tycoon's map generation was far from perfect, it generated something that resembled a map, rather than a series of overlapping rectangles. Further to this point, the industry placement in Locomotion is often a challenge to transport for, but in all the wrong ways. Logistically impossible, embedded in a landlocked mountain valley, or simply at two such distant points as to make attempts at transport infeasible. Often a combination of all three.
Many industrial issues would be lessened if the cargo flow of the game wasn't so brain fryingly insane. In most transport games, service begins when vehicles arrive, and only the cargo relevant to the service is readied. In Locomotion, service is assumed with as little as one station tile, and due to a glitch in the way cargo is handled, players may often end up with irrelevant cargo flowing over from other stations as if the entire cargo flow of the map was a liquid, passengers and mail sloshing into the coal route in the corner of the world, away from any city. However, in the realm of functioning as designed, getting cargo to an endpoint is not an easy task, especially in the early game.
Moving products into their respective industries is easy enough, but delivering finished goods (and mail) to early towns is nigh impossible due to the structuring of cargo acceptance. Goods are only accepted by certain buildings, and a station's catchment area has to overlap enough of them to produce a single demand. For mail, the problem is even more boggling, as while many houses produce mail, most won't start accepting mail until 10 years in from a 1900 start. Due to the aforementioned service issue, this means players can have piles cargo that's all dressed up with nowhere to go.
All of the issues mentioned in the previous two points would be far less of an issue if building a network wasn't such a click heavy pain. Locomotion uses the same exact building tools as Roller Coaster Tycoon, which are very ill suited to this purpose. Everything has to be built by the individual tile. Certainly, there are shortcuts to allow you to slap down multiple tiles, but this is only useful for very rare straightaways and worthless for anything else. I will say in favor of the interface that the menus pop open when hovered, but alas that is about all the positive to be said of the interface.
To a final point, Towns are a menace. When provided services, they can have explosive growth (literally off the chart, no less) and this can choke out infrastructure growth. Like most other systems in the game, town growth is fairly braindead, often resulting in a nongrid of too many useless roads and attempts to level the mountains and hills rather than building along them. Or tunnels to nowhere, when buildings are not built underground.
[During this review, I never once mentioned finances. This is because with the ease of generating money, it becomes quite useless as a marker of progress and due to an exponential inflation system, worthless as to telling players how much buying power they actually have.]
Overall, Locomotion makes for a poor showing, even for the release time, and does not hold up at all. However, there is great potential in the OpenLoco project to fix most of the issues I have mentioned in this review. Had it been released a decade earlier, it may have been an impressive iteration on Transport Tycoon.
Post edited April 09, 2019 by Darvond
