On the one hand, Train Giant is a nifty transportation sim. On the other hand, the mix of an odd economic model, seemingly random development patterns, and the lack of any sort of intelligent routing can make games more than a little exasperating. The documentation associated with the game leaves much to be desired as well.

Still, there's little more satisfying than getting a shotgun seat ride on a commuter rail line you've laid out, and the presence of a "stock market" mechanism that cycles steadily should give you enough cash to do pretty much whatever you want on a map.

Played a PS2 game called A-Train 6, very old.. and quite a challenge to actually understand. However its been years since that and I was curious about the PC sequel of A-Train 9. Which now features a useless name in front of it... As usual with Japanese releases they're hardly supported so we don't much vehicles to choose over, there is also 200 vehicles in the Shanghai DLC but they forgot to translate to it English. (2 marks off)

Overall Its a nice game, graphics are good and detail is great its only held back by limited train numbers because more its always better, it has a remove system that's a bit odd and imo they could do with plenty of empty maps because I prefer it that way in many management sims. Oh yeah... lacks manual, a decent one. so expect a rocky ride because the experience will be hell.

I've played and really enjoyed a couple of A-Trains before, albeit I've missed a few generations. It wasn't ever the most intuitive game but I really enjoy micro management and transport and city sims and previously found A-Train to be more involved but also more fun and Transport and Railroad Tycoon.

THIS game, though. I haven't played for long enough to speak on the city sim model (it develops VERY slowly), but as for the actual part of the game the player controls...the only way I can describe it is archaic and byzantine. THERE IS NO PATHFINDING. You want a bus to run from a metropolis on one side of the map to the other? You figure you just select the two stations, right? No, you have to define behavior at EVERY SINGLE INTERSECTION between the two stations. Say you get one of those intersections wrong. No warning or notice. It will just putt along eternally on a leisurely trip to oblivion.

I'm hoping I'm just being retarded and missing the majority of the controls. God knows the manual doesn't help at all with that.

Completely unacceptable and unplayable.

I was hoping that this would be a serious economic/city building simulation along the lines of Cities XL, Cities in Motion, Transport Giant, etc. I was disappointed in this respect but ended up enjoying the game anyway.

It took me quite a while to graph the mechanics due to the lack of any kind of meaningful English documentation. Once I finally figured out it, I discovered that while the early game is somewhat challenging, once your city reaches a certain critical mass (5-10k population), making money ceases to become any kind of problem and you are free to build your city with few constraints.

For a game that's nominally about trains, I found that trains played a surprisingly small role in the city's economic development. Once your city gets going, your income from trains is dwarfed by the income you receive from your businesses. I was actually able to develop a large city without using trains at all.

The stock market is equally puzzling. It would've been really cool if the stock market was influenced by what was going on in the city. Instead, stocks just seem to randomly fluctuate within a preset range. This makes the market little more than a gamey way to increase your capital in the early game.

On the positive side, the cities look really, really pretty (especially at night). As a serious economic gamer I am not overly concerned with graphics but even I couldn't help but be delighted by the beautiful cityscapes that you can create. The ability to ride on a train or bus for a "man on the street" view of the city is also a very nice touch.

I agree with the viewer below who mentioned that the selection of trains and buildings is somewhat limiting. There are a fairly limited number of tall buildings so the skyline tends to get rather repetitive. You have to try to stagger the placement and orientation of the buildings to achieve a realistic, heterogenous-looking skyline. The game could greatly benefit from some downloadable content.

So in summary, this is not a serious econimic sim as I had hoped, but the great graphics make it enjoyable enough to hold your attention for a little while. I will revisit the game if/when they come out with some additional content.

This is a very nice city-builder, transportation simulation, but either I am missing something or the trains do not have signals and consistently run into each other at signal-less switches.

Where are THE TRAIN SIGNALS? Nice micro-management of TRAFFIC SIGNALS for trucks, but the game is called TRAINS :-) and no switch signals???

If it had signals I would rate it a FOUR, but without - a THREE.

Now if I'm just too stupid to find them, someone please let me know.

GAMEPLAY

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What I have DISCOVERED, because there's no useful manual is that the basic premise of the game is to:

1. Create A Material Goods Manufacturing area and transport via train or truck, your finished goods to different WAREHOUSE locations where you want your cities to develop. It may take several large warehouses to house some of the larger quantity materials needed to build some of the more extravagant buildings.

2. The AI will use the goods and start building out your city with simple phase one houses, stores etc. You can accelerate the AI's building by SPICING the city with a few key buildings that will have an influence on what the AI builds, but your primary objective is to build material goods mfgs and transport those goods to the different parts of the map where you want to build your cities.

That's it! I still have not figured out what the INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS do - manual doesn't say, but they're in the game and they're extremely expensive, so they must have SOME influence, just haven't figured it out yet.

very good city management, buiding and transport management game. takes acouple of hours to learn, but well worth it.

the city also grows as you play, you provide the goods and some buildings, but mainly transport, which is important, and helps city to grow.

agood buy, would recommend it.

I love train games and city builders so I thought Id give this one a try. It is a bit different than most games. I had not played any other A-Train games. I love the game, I just dont understand how you make a Train Game and NOT have track signals. so that means one train per track. Hopefully they will fix this. But other than than. It is a great game that takes a bit to get use to.

Basically and updated model of the original ArtDink game "Take the A Train".

Once you get the hang of the clunky interface this game is actually quite challenging and fun to play. You can drill down to a complex level of train and bus operation - something missing from many train sims out there. It is essentially an economic game that allows you to expend you budget on overground, underground or ground level operations, buy Buildings and power stations, and invest in the stock market. The ulitmate goal is to retire or make $100 billion (yen? Dollars?). The AI is very proficient at expansion (and contraction), and unless certain criteria are met, you may find your operations running into the red and the rapid expansion of your town or city going into decline. This is an absorbing game that can easily occupy your free time with difficult challenges

A-Train 9 is a pretty game! The game mechanics work well as they did in A-Train 8 (but you will have to figure out how to play on your own as there is no real tutorial to speak of). I believe the main difference between A-Train 8 and A-Train 9 are graphic enhancements.

If by some strange situation you've learned how to play A-Train, then you are a step ahead of many. There are no tutorials in the game, although if you speak German or Japanese you will be able to find user created tutorials on Youtube.com But there is none in the game that will help you. You are basically thrown into the game from the start and expected to figure it out for yourself, which is really not an easy situation.

Some tool tips in the game are just plain wrong and may say the same thing but do completely different things. There is however a manual, in html format that comes with A-Train 9, but other than the hot key sheet it's pretty much of no value to you towards figuring out how to play the game, with some information provided being blatantly incorrect. And when there is information that IS correct, there isn't enough of that information to be of much help.

Here is an example of the manual's contents... The option is the main menu. You click that and you are shown an image of the game screen and they have circled 6 different areas of the screen and numbered them. You would expect to see the corrosponding text for each number to let you know what that part of the game screen does. However... All the text manages to say is the following:

"1 The Main Menu. You can control nearly all aspects of the game here, from saving the game to laying tracks and placing buildings. "

Yes, there are a total of 6 items that are circled on the main game screen image but all they tell you is you can control nearly all aspects of the game from here. The rest of the manual is no better than this so don't expect help from the manual.

I have to admit, the whole template, save, load, load as, import as, import template is probably the most difficult thing to figure out and it really shouldn't be. Doing common tasks in games like saving, loading etc are some of the most basic tasks one can do in a game but for some reason the developers of A-Train 9 have seen fit to make it a difficult chore. Let's say that you want to create a new map in A-Train 9's map editor... One would simply expect that you'd click "File/New" and be able to create a new map. Then to save one would simply expect "File/save". That's how most games handle such seemingly trivial things like this, but apparently not in A-Train 9. This is one area of the games manual that you will likely need to read to figure out how it works and one area of the manual that gives you just enough information that you'll be able to figure out the rest of what they don't provide on your own through trial and error.

It's a pretty game when you turn up all the options, which are not found in the game by the way, you need to use a seperate application that is in the installation folder of the game. Make sure to set your options before entering the game since you won't be able to while in the game.

For the most part, the visuals are very very nice, but when you have zoomed out to a decent level so that you can see enough of the landscape to work with it, they have seen fit to add a layer of fog over everything which makes it more difficult to see anything, and there are no settings that can be maxed out enough to get rid of that fog, it's actually quite annoying. But when you zoom back in, the fog leaves the world as quickly as it came into it, and you are left looking at a visually pretty game again. It's no crysis 2 with regards to the visuals, but for a Train management game it's visually pretty for the most part. However... Each building that you can place in the game has it's own footprint, and when you place two different buildings next to each other in the game the difference between the footprints is so shockingly different that they stick out like a sore thumb. However we have to keep in mind that this game is a sort of Train management game so things such as this should be overlooked if possible.

As far as the Train management portion of the game goes, I am the first to admit that they give you the tools that you need, and the information you need in the differet areas of the game that it's actually useful. This is where the enjoyable game play comes in, I was never left feeling that there was some sort of information missing from the game that I felt I had to have to be able to make proper decissions, it's all there as far as I'm concerned.

For $29.95 it's not a bad price, however don't expect hundreds of trains, that many trains is only available to the Japanese paying public with the expansions that they put out for our brethren over there, here in the N.A. game we are limited to only a few handfuls of trains, and other transportation vehicles as well as buildings. Don't get me wrong, I was just pleased to be able to get the game at all here in N.A. (Thank you GamersGate) Perhaps they'll make it available to us later if the game sells well, but if not you may end up feeling the way that I do, which is that you don't have nearly enough Trains, vehicles and buildings in the game, which detracts from the game overall every time that I start it up.

The game has a small grouping of scenarios if you wish to play them, however from what I've been told from some of my Japanese friends that play A-Train 9, the replay value is in the map editor and creating your own worlds to play in. Many of my friends are into the "N" gauge trains so they play with the map editor to create their own worlds where they can lay out their "perfect" layout of rails and roads. And i completely agree with them, the replay value in A-Train 9 comes solely from the map editor, so make sure you figure out how to use it else total game time might be under about 10 hours if you only try the scenarios one time

Sadly, I have not found a repository of maps for either A-Train 8 or now A-Train 9 so you'll be on your own to create your own maps with the map editor which most people do not have the patience and or time to learn how to use beyond making a game automatically generated map and throwing down some roads, and slapping a few buildings here and there before you either get bored or get frustrated.

Unfortunately... Due to the small amount of trains, scenarios (maps), buildings in the game and a lack of any real tutorial, I have to rate this game a low 3. I almost want to drop it into the 2 slot but the pretty visuals gave it a slight boost and kept it in the 3 rating area.

This is one of those games that looks lovely before you purchase it, but it's also one of those games that few people will actually spend the amount of time necessary to figure out what they are supposed to do in the game and just shelve it after a few hours of being frustrated at trying to figure out how to play it.

In the next version, I hope that they give proper video tutorials, and instructions on what you are supposed to actually do in the game instead of just dumping you into the game and leaving you to fend for yourself, it's not like a First person shooter game where you are dumped into a game world and know instinctively that you need to go and shoot at the enemy and avoid being shot by the enemy, this game is more complex than that, but unfortunately doesn't offer you instructions on what to do.

Overall, not a bad game if you have the patience and time to figure out how to actually play it.