Recent reviews by theotherjason

VR is totally broken. It won't launch at all unless you figure out to lower the resolution via SteamVR settings. The tables then load as just a black void with red sparkles around your hands. It's baffling that they sell a VR bundle when VR doesn't work at all.

This is a mandatory tool for tuning performance in any VR game. It has absolutely tons of little tweaks to SteamVR as well.

After several years of playing VR games and introducing people to VR, this is still *the* game I use to show people VR. I never sank a ton of hours into replaying it, but I absolutely loved that first play through.

This is simultaneously one of the best and one of the worst VR games. Worst is only because of performance.

The VR gameplay is all about feel and is just about perfect. The map and tools and everything are physical objects you have to pull out and can throw around and lose (to the magical lost and found shacks). I love the way the train controls feel totally realistic in some ways, but the world is also scaled down and a bit cartoony to make it a video game. The world reminds me a lot of My Summer Car with its quirky realism and lots of things you just need to figure out by getting it wrong a few times.

The world and game don’t look nearly good enough to have performance this awful. I have a 2080 ti, but I still get massive stutters every 30 seconds and huge areas of the map that stay down around 30 FPS. It’s CPU bound big time, and it doesn’t seem like there’s a CPU powerful enough to run it in the known universe. If low frames and stutters in VR make you motion sick, stay away. I’m lucky enough to be able to stomach it.

I absolutely love it despite the horrific performance. Hopefully they can at least optimize out the stutters.

I’ve only played in VR with full motion controls. The actual bowling physics and feel is outstandingly good, at least to a mediocre bowler in the real world. My scores in game were immediately in line with my real scores. Having a weightless ball matters far less than I expected.

Aspects of the game show that it is an inexperienced indie team. The menu and options are tough to understand and the UI is frankly bad, but that’s kind of par for the course in an indie VR game. There are more physics options than you could ever want. The only option I’m desperately missing is a way to rotate the world. Steam’s default play space is wide and shallow; bowling really wants the opposite. I’m sure there are workarounds via Steam somewhere, but there should really be a way to rotate in game.

There’s no real tutorial and no single player fluff beyond “play bowling now.” The bowling itself is so great that I love it. I haven’t yet tried multiplayer.

Oh, and turn off the god awful commentating before you even load the game for the first time.

Vive support is totally nonexistent. I doubt the game runs in any VR setup at all. It either black screens permanently or sticks your camera to the ceiling and does not allow you to move nor interact with anything. The developers said that it was a known issue that would be patched within a few days of release. The known issue is that they did not have time to implement VR but wanted customer money from promising VR support anyway. It's been 15+ days, and they've disappeared without a word.

Unplayable if you have any USB controllers plugged in. Your character endlessly twirls around and stares at the ceiling. Support says to unplug every other peripheral on the PC. No thanks, I'll just refund.

I've spent over 20 hours in this game as someone who played the previous Train Sim games, and I cannot steer people away from this game with enough caution. This release would have been slightly embarassing as an early release alpha, must less the actual release that was pushed. I have no idea how a tiny studio like Dovetail pushes a release out that was obviously rushed, unfinished, and untested.

- Performance is awful. Every other review covered this. I have a top of the line machine and frequently drop below 20 fps.
- The tutorials do not cover 10% of the game mechanics. Already know about all of the signal types, aspects, brake systems, hill starts, switching? Great! If not, good luck! There is no info provided in game or in the manual.
- The scenarios are very small in number and all broken. Switches will fail to switch, leaving you saving and loading repeatedly in hopes that they fix themselves. Sometimes they do, sometimes they never will.
- The scenario designers decided that having the player walk for over a mile in real time is a fun and rewarding game play experience.. multiple times. I think the real world probably has trucks or more than one employee at the yard, but what do I know?
- Saving and loading is 100% broken and should never be used. Loading a saved game means sound will broken, the alerter will trip, automatic switches will never switch, and signals will be at danger for no reason and refuse passage. Opening windows will mute the outside sound and closing them will make it sound like you are outside. I got stuck in the roof once when I dared to save and load.
- It has crashed a few times.
- I have derailed while following all signals and speed limits, instantly failing a multiple hour mission.
- The manual goes into detail about the alerter system, which is quite odd because it is entirely broken in game. No one at Dovetail even tried it before release.
- There is a leveling system.. sort of. You gain levels. What do they do? Precisely nothing!
- There is a collectable system.. sort of. They are randomly and idiodically placed with no hints or map, and guess what they do. Nothing!


All that said, if you are a very patient train nerd who has played multiple train sim games in the past, it's pretty when it works!

Completely broken due to reliance on GFWL. Codemasters couldn't be asked to fix this in the 6+ months of warning they had from MS. You are now totally unable to save the game.