Developer: Troglobytes Games
Publisher: Digital Vortex Entertainment
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
RailGods of Hysterra – Preview
The Cthulhu Mythos that came to life thanks to the works of H. P. Lovecraft has been milked dry these last few years, spawning more movies, series, and games than we could count. Is that a bad thing? Not really. Thanks to this, we got cool series such as Lovecraft Country and spooky games such as The Shore. While the latter didn’t score extremely high on our site, mainly due to some clunky chase sequences, we still quite enjoyed it. Now, we are taking a closer look at RailGods of Hysterra, which has recently been released in Early Access on Steam. While we loved the concept, it seems there’s quite a bit of work to be done before this game could be considered a finished product.
RailGods of Hysterra puts a spin on the traditional base-building and survival genre by putting your base on a train. You’ll be able to expand your train as you progress through the game by receiving additional carriages that you can fill with workbenches and other workstations. It offers all the basics that involve gear crafting, cooking, and researching new items. The twist here is that you’ll need to feed your sentient train the remains of your fallen enemies. It’s a simple variation from the traditional fuel format, but it’s a cool concept nonetheless. Outside of the train, you’ll have to fend for yourself, finding new objectives to complete and fending off loads of enemies. You’ll be fairly weak at the start, but you’ll gradually unlock new items and skills that make you a bit more powerful. Combat itself is fairly straightforward, as you can just run around enemies, perform your attacks with your equipped weapons, or use your skills. Dodge has a fairly lengthy cooldown, so you’ll probably try to keep your distance more than always going up close.
As a whole, the game nails its presentation. The train looks cool, the engine car looks creepy and interesting, the enemy designs are decent, and the environments don’t look half bad either. The latter runs into an issue we’ll get into below, however. The attack animations are also not bad, but we assume more impressive skills will be added to the mix in the future. The sound design is quite good as well. In terms of presentation, we are looking forward to seeing what new areas open up in the Early Access periodic updates.
While we loved the overall concept of RailGods of Hysterra, we felt that the current build is a bit too basic to even be considered a proper Early Access release. A lot of the main comfort features of the genre are simply not present. Storage was probably our biggest issue, as item stacks are very low, meaning you’ll have tons of stacks of the same materials in your limited storage space. On top of that, you can not even quick-sort your storage, making it almost impossible to get an overview. This became increasingly annoying as we amassed more resources for our ever-growing train. Other annoyances involved the hunger system, which has already been slightly tweaked during our testing period. The new skill that prevents hunger from going down on the train didn’t work for us, however.
If the issue were just limited to comfort features and minor bugs, things wouldn’t be so bad. We can honestly say we were already close to being burned out after playing through a few areas. Our first few stops with the train offered the exact same terrain, with the exact same enemies, with the exact same two boars marking the end point of the map. It felt as if we were already grinding through boring maps before the game actually began. We hope that the finished product will have a more interesting introduction that doesn’t rely on playing through almost similar-looking areas, and with a better and more attractive tutorial. As it stands now, you’ll have to read through quite a bit of text at the beginning for some features, while other features are not even explained.
Conclusion
RailGods of Hysterra has a very interesting concept on paper and does provide a few fun twists and turns on traditional base-building mechanics. We loved the setting and what the game is seemingly aiming for. Now, however, the Early Access version feels like a poor representation of what the game is supposed to be or what it will eventually become. We were slightly burned out several hours into the game, due to wading through similar environments, poorly outlined objectives, incomplete tutorials, and slow pacing. We didn’t exactly hate our time with RailGods of Hysterra, but we would still recommend waiting for a few more updates before picking this one up.
No Comments