Voidtrain actively disrespects your time. It tests my patience, and while they have just released an automation update that addresses some of the tedium, it doesn’t address the root problems which are causing most players to quit long before they reach that point. The current build is closer to a first-person idling game than a survival/crafting game.

In Voidtrain, you are on a train speeding through a surrealist dreamscape full of garbage, alien fauna, and nazis. Here’s where it goes wrong: In other crafting/survival games you have a world of opportunities to interact with. Voidtrain can’t support that; it’s literally on rails.

Resources randomly spawn in the void and you need to swim over and grab them. It’s extremely tedious because you can only collect one item at a time. There’s not like a pile of wood, there’s just single wood planks. It’s like if Subnautica didn’t have titanium debris, just outcroppings and you had to collect each One. At. A. Time.

And because you need SO many resources (fuel and materials for each item you make), your super train moves at a crawl the entire time. Having a train in this format is a conceptually bad idea. There's no point in going fast because any kind of speed means you just miss items.

There are 4 major crafting materials from which almost everything else is built through refining. There are also 4 minor crafting materials for a total of 8 raw materials, these aren’t used nearly as often and are primarily for combat and late-game engine upkeep – moreover they are found floating in the void or from combat. They have addressed this slightly by removing ice from the void so you must synthesize water by building a condenser. However, raw materials are where Voidtrain breaks from the comparison with Raft, which has 10 major crafting materials and 9 minor crafting materials that form the basis of its balance.

After gathering resources, you have building development. It’s awful. Before you can build a crafting station, you need to research it. To do this, you get either half or all the resources to build the structure… and then those disappear and now you can build it for real. Which means any time you build something, you need to collect the resources to build it twice.

The big issue here is that, like Raft, this only happens the first time you build something, but in Voidtrain you will only build most items once and the ones you build multiple times you need to make A LOT of (particularly storage and storage racks). You’re not improving on existing designs (like taking an existing item and upgrading it), you’re building a new upgraded version whole cloth. So there is no gratification for researching because it means you have to do all that work again. Likewise, the survival elements are so underdeveloped they can be ignored and the overall resource economy is weaker for it.

Hunger only affects your health regeneration, so you don’t **have** to eat. If you don’t need to eat, you don’t need to build that garden and now a whole branch of the tech tree is unnecessary. Plus, there’s no drink meter so drinking water (formerly melting ice) has the same effect as growing and cooking but for a fraction of the price.

Likewise, refining is boring and hostile game design. You craft your metal ingots from scrap then you take those to another crafting station to convert them into a single piece of hardware (bolts, pipes, gears, etc.). It doesn’t work in Voidtrain, but the reason it does work with Subnautica’s wiring kits is because you need different resources – that’s the challenge. Putting iron ingots into a machine that makes bolts and gears (at a cost of 10 seconds per item) is a waste of time by design.

Put another way, because Voidtrain has a small variety of unlimited resources flying toward you, limited inventory space is the only way they balance against looting everything -- which is why the initial chest only has 4 storage slots. But almost every crafting recipe only uses variations on the 4 main resources, which invalidates the limited inventory space.

Their workaround to this is turning fungible scrap metal into single-purpose refined parts (created in a 1:1 iron in -> bolts out ratio) that don’t stack so you’re forced to make storage – and by extension collect more resources. So you’ll make gears and bolts, each of which costs a single iron ingot (plus 10 seconds) and are functionally indistinguishable from iron ingots -- emphasizing that the only reason they do this is to make sure you have enough inventory space and also pad the runtime. It would be like if Subnautica made you craft titanium into “titanium sheets” for habitats rather than making them directly from raw titanium. It’s an extra step in the process and only serves to waste your time.

Bigger objects (like the steam engine) don’t need different resources – they just need **more** resources, so you pull in dozens of pieces of scrap metal one at a time with the grappling gun, wait several minutes to smelt them, and then wait several more minutes to convert them into parts. It makes Voidtrain feel like a first-person idling game. Put it this way: Just in crafting time, the steam engine takes 14 minutes of waiting for material processing to research and build.

Between long stretches of void, you’ll visit stations to do some exploring and shoot space nazis. These depots are light on resources; you can’t break down any of the scenery or take decorations. You open specially marked loot boxes and some resources pop out. What should be an opportunity to reward you for making it through the void (especially because these stations are the only place where you can upgrade your train -- again being balanced around limited storage space) instead becomes a clunky combat diversion before starting over in another stretch of void nearly indistinguishable from the last one.

Since space nazis don’t often appear in the void, there are also Space Sharks to randomly attack your train. The problem is the UI is far too clunky for these kinds of encounters, making combat better situated to dedicated battle zones. Fitting with the “Voidtrain hates your time” theme, each tool has its own draw and sheath animation before the actual menu pops up, during which time you’re locked out of anything else – which is annoying -- and drawing your weapon has its own animation and firing delay. So, if a space shark attacks and you’re building something, you have 3-5 seconds where you can’t do anything to stop it.

And that’s Voidtrain’s gameplay loop. Every part of it feels designed to waste your time. Voidtrain’s rail system and crafting system are each artificially slow and the gathering system is fundamentally repetitive and tedious. If that sounds fun, by all means; but this feels closer to a proof of concept.