Recent reviews by tom7aar

Good concept with lots of personality ruined by bots and neglect from Valve.

24th of august 2024:

While watching the latest developments, I feel the community has been heard and I can recommend this game once more.

The coming TSW5 version gives the option for a free core upgrade without the new DLC, this is in my opinion the right way.
Old content like Great Western Express is getting a remaster.
More countries are getting routes, like the Netherlands.
Guard mode is coming, altho it's not something I'm looking forward to, it has been a feature requested by the community.

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11th of november 2023:

While TSW is a big improvement from TSC in terms of graphics and gameplay, the practices from Dovetail have become worse.

I get how there are many DLCs, as they say it you could see the game as a collection where you only buy the routes and trains you like.
However, whenever they provide a major update to the game, they charge you money as well to upgrade to the new version.
In my opinion it should be one or the other, and I think they should only charge for DLC instead of base game updates.
This also means that some bugfixes are paywalled, some get patched as they should, but a lot of bugs still exist in the game.
Back in the days of Train Sim Classic you'd get the base update for free, and you'd have to buy the new DLC if you wanted to.
I honestly wish they would go back to this model and that TSW4 will be the last paid major update.
But until that isn't the case, it's one of my biggest reasons to not recommend this game.

Back in the day they had a preserved collection team, which fixed up the quality and gameplay of older DLC to whatever was standard at that time.
Currently I rarely see updates to older DLCs being updated, which I find disapointing to say the least.
At this point I doubt they even exist anymore, while in my opinion they should always be rotating older DLCs (both routes and rolling stock) to look for improvements.
When given the proper attention and marketing they could make some extra income from older DLCs.

I also have the feeling that within their teams there are different levels of quality, for example the quality of timetables on routes.
To put it this way; A timetable made by Joe should be it's own selling point, as I enjoy those timetables way more than others.
As of the time of writing I'm really interested in the upcoming reworked timetables for Koln-Aachen.

As my last point, I wish they would choose more interesting routes.
Some routes are too lineair, this is why Dresden-Riesa is one of my favorite routes as it has multiple destinations and multiple paths.
Being dutch, I'm disapointed in how there are never any dutch routes, altho this might have something to do with licensing.
I don't know which routes from other countries would be interesting, but people have made various suggestions on the official forums.

17th of October 2015:
International Payday 2 uninstall-day.

It's a very realistic train sim, but there are some bad things about it:

* Too many expensive DLCs (I personally only buy them when they are like 75% off)
* Scenarios often don't work. (don't load properly or you get stuck on certain tracks)
* In some scenarios the instructions are hard to understand.
* No feature to see which Workshop scenarios you can play or not because of DLCs.
* Sometimes you get a red signal in front of you out of the blue. (you pass a green/clear signal while the next one is red/danger, so the green signal should be yellow/caution)
* You don't get new scenarios over time through updates, the only way is through Steam Workshop or buying more DLCs.

But, there are a few nice things aswell:

* Custom scenario's are easy to install and fun to play.
* The sim itself is pretty realistic.
* Free upgrade when the next version comes out. (I bought it when the game was Train Simulator 2013, and I got a free upgrade to 2014)

It would be nice to see a multiplayer feature in the future tho, like more people driving on a large route with an admin or PC controlling the switches, etc.

If you like trains like I do, and you don't really mind the cons it has, you should buy it (especially when on sale). If you think the cons are gonna annoy you, simply don't buy the game.