I told myself I was going to wait for a Steam Sale to buy this, but I've seen so much feedback and third-party footage on YouTube and social media that I seem to have accidentally given in. I went for the Deluxe edition because, well it's James for a fiver off. Well played, DTG. I've played a little over 4 hours, running through scenario mode for most of that and then some free roam sessions. I also spent some time messing around to see if I could get it working in VR. More on that in another thread.... The route / island I really like the atmosphere of the route, they've done a top job of making it instantly recognisable through the use of custom assets and a colour palette that matches the TV series I grew up with. I had a quick roam around some "famous" locations and found C&B Barber (of Duck fame) outside Crosby, but was a bit disappointed that the Station Master's house (of Thomas fame) was nowhere to be seen in Tidmouth and that the siding and signal box that Donald visited (also in Tidmouth) is missing as well. I'm aware it's supposed to be a blend of the railway that was described and shown in the books, the model TV series and the CGI series, but in my opinion the the track layout has overly simplified. There are many scenes from the books and model series that you simply won't be able to recreate because the track layout and some essential buildings are simply missing. Examples would be the well-known scene in the model series with Gordon plonked in his siding at Knapford when Thomas wakes him up (in the game Gordon's simply sat in the station). Or the shed in the books and the model series that Thomas rolls out of in Thomas Comes to Breakfast. Presumably adding extra track and re-testing all the scenarios is going to be a hard "no" from DTG, so we'll just have to live with it until some godlike entity makes a whole Sodor Island mod using the exisitng route as a base. The engines Spot on. The models are presumably all Mattel assets, but they are excellent nevertheless and you really feel like you're in an interactive version of the TV show. My only gripes with these models are the wheels that are way too thick and hang an inch over the edge of the rails (as they did in TSW), and the weird animation of the couplings / chains which probably need to be slowed down a bit. As others have mentioned, the ability to control the whistles would be nice, rather than a random selection of single, double and triple peep-peeps and poop-poops. I'm looking forward to the upcoming face control feature will make screenshots more interesting. The UI The map is very nice. I wish we had something like this in TSW. The first thing I noticed was that the F1 key correctly hides the entire HUD when you're on foot, which is a nice change from TSW where the compass stays on the screen. Hopefully this means a fix is on the way for this irritating bug which has been in TSW for donkey's years. The menu bugs from TSW seem to have been carried over though... In certain menus you change a setting and hit save, then when you exit the menu it asks you if you want to save because the save feature did nothing. Hitting the "Tab" key to open the doors produces an odd-looking menu, maybe the font's the wrong one or set too big? Although that's not really an issue since there's now a key to open and close the left and right hand doors, which I'm pretty sure we don't have in TSW (haven't checked). The way timetables are listed could do with being overhauled I don't know how a child is supposed to understand that "22:45 - 00:30" mean the service starts at 22 45 and lasts for 30 minutes. At the very least the two pieces of information need to be in separate columns or in different colours. The way they are presented now just looks like it's showing you the start and end time. It's as if they assumed 100% of their customers are going to be experienced TSW users. Control mechanics Not sure what they thinking with the control scheme. I've been playing on PC with a keyboard and it's just not intuitive at all. Surely consideriing the target audience it would have been better to discard the "neutral" setting on the reverser and just configure a single key / button to cycle it between forwards and backwards when stopped, with another two keys / buttons mapped to brake off / increase throttle and decrease throttle / brake on. It seems you can't even coast, since both buttons act on the brake and throttle at the same time so you always have a bit of one or the other being applied. Anyway I've done what I did with TSW and remapped everything to my trusty PS3 controller, works a treat. No track monitor. This makes it more or less impossible to not end up derailing at some point. Using the speed limit track markers, you can only see the *next* speed limit change, so in cases where the limit drops from 90 to 60 and then immediately down to 15, you're left with about three seconds to brake before the points throw you off the track and send you spinning into outer space. How this got past the testers is beyond me, but it's been acknowledged by DTG so I'll leave it at that. Platforms I've lost count of the number of times I've failed to mind the gap between the train and the platform. Why is there such a huge void between the platform edge and the stock? It's annoying and I don't understand why this approach was taken, unless it's to accomodate future CGI series American and Japanese outline stock maybe? Turntables. Spirit of Steam was released four years ago. Surely that's enough time to fix the issue with turntables turning by themselves just as you're moving off them? Apparently not. Getting out of TIdmouth Sheds is a bit of an unwelcome challenge that's resulted in some flying engines for me. Buggy outside camera Do you want your outside camera to stay a fixed distance from the train? Of course you don't, you want it to jump wildly back and forth every time you pass a signal, lamppost or other obstactle that doesn't require any camera movement (apparently in WOS this extends to passing above certain types of fenceposts). I know it's based on the TSW engine, but as it's being marketed as an entirely separate product / franchise you'd have thought glaring issues impacting the overall user experience would be fixed / improved. I've never seen any other game with a camera that jumps every few seconds. Overall it's a good game for the audience it's targeting, but it's severely let down by age-old bugs that really shouldn't be found beyond the testing / beta phase. Clearly a lot of work has gone into the game so it's a shame that these "legacy features" got ported over. Would love to know everyone's thoughts on the above topics! JB
