Just wondering what the good and bad things are about this game. The screenshots look nice, the trains and routes are real, and there is an editor.
I see it as a virtual model railway so you aren't getting the realism tsw or other train sims get. I've heard the editor is easy to use. It has a lot of content to use and there's the download station with priority and much higher speeds given to those who buy a subscription.
I play trainz for its Australian content. It has a good route building editor, but the routes look artificial in a lot of cases. Quality of assets varies significantly from very good to terrible. The biggest difference for me that I notice is that the graphical quality is often below that of TSC and it runs terribly with lots of stutter and pop-in. The driving experience varies wildly too, but even the best driving Trainz locomotives are no comparison to TSC or TSW.
Good for the route building in Surveyor but you need a third party payware programme called Transdem to import real world terrain and mapping. Poor at just about everything else. The driving experience has always been bad, partly low quality cabs and unrealistic physics, but mainly because there is no easy way to set up a player timetable and follow it. In addition the signaller/despatcher only routes AI trains, the player/driver has to route their own, working out which points and junctions to switch as you go. For what they charge for the latest full version or their “hook” of all the content if you take out a Netflix style monthly subscription, it’s not worth it. I only keep it around as I said for the ease of route building though mostly these days I just do model railway style plans for which another (free) utility called Basemapz allows you to convert the track plan images to scale and overlay in surveyor.
