The game places you as a fledgling business owner who wishes to make money ferrying people, goods or mail around town and between towns. You aren't limited to trains but can operate a fleet of buses, ships and aeroplanes as well, all with their own operating costs, advantages and drawbacks. It certainly is a refreshing change of pace from the more combatitive play styles most games centre on.

Isometric tiles - attack!

The first thing that strikes you upon opening the box is the detailed manual provided with the game. At 144 pages, it should clue you in quickly as to the detail of the simulation being presented to you. Reading a good percentage of the manual is a smart first move, as the in-game tutorial is terse, to say the least, giving you enough to see how to start a simple bus service or train system but not much more.

Starting the game, the next thing that strikes you is its somewhat dated appearance. Isometric, sprite-based tile graphics put the game a few years behind the curve, and while this technique is not necessarily a bad one it depends heavily on the quality and care with which the sprites are drawn. Locomotion isn't bad in this regard but it does suffer from trying to be too detailed - as a result the buildings and other shapes lack distinction, especially at large map scales when they become a pixelated mess. Fortunately you won't be spending a lot of time at the zoomed-out level, as the bulk of the game needs you to be zoomed in as close as possible as you lay out new track or fiddle with a train's carriages.

Meet Breakers Bridge in the early years.

The third thing to strike you is the quirky user interface. It's consistent, but operates to a slightly different set of rules from the normal Windows conventions, and thus you may need to spend a bit of time learning the layout. It doesn't help that there are oddities such as being unable to set overall game options (graphics resolution and the like) till you have started a game.

The other most aggrivating issue relates to track or road construction. The game insists that you lay down a tile for every step of the way - no short cuts like using a dragged line to do a mass placement here. There is a 'repeat last time' click available which does cut down on the pain somewhat, but every step of the way neccessitates at least one click per tile. To make matters worse, each click costs you money - make a mistake and you have to spend more to undo the construction work and place the corrected tile. As we found early on, this a great way to blow large amounts of money fast without getting much done.

Here it is a scant few years on, notice how it has grown
purely thanks to the train service supplying the steelworks.

The game would benefit hugely by providing some form of planning mode where you could lay down tiles in a trial fashion and get the total cost before you commit to the whole shebang. Making matters even more complicated is the intricate correlation between roads, tracks and where the two cross. Roads can cross tracks as level crossings, but only when the road and track are at right angles to each other. As roads can't travel diagonally but tracks can, it becomes very easy to create large stretches of terrain that roads cannot cross. Tracks can join together to form loops and interconnected routes, but can only merge at gradual angles. And don't forget your signals, or bad things can happen when two trains try to share one piece of track. (To prove the point, we spent some time gleefully constructing arcane death traps for trains to crash on.)

Detailed information about each vehicle, its monthly profit,
running costs and the like can be examined.

Add to all this an AI opponent that seems to cheat in its ability to fund extravagant roading constructions and you have a game that can take a while with which to get to grips. Oddly enough, it is precisely these interrelations that give the game much of its strength. Knowing how best to maximise track and road utilisation is an art learned through trial and error in the game.

It might seem, with the fairly disparaging comments made thus far, that we didn't enjoy Locomotion. Far from it, this is a prime example of a game's actual gameplay outshining its detractions. Once you learn the meat of how things work there is a great deal of satisfaction in constructing trade routes and watching your town grow and change - thanks to your company's efforts. As an added bonus, the more succesful a town becomes the more varied and diverse its transporation needs become, forcing the player to re-evaluate the carriage composition of the trains servicing the town or rebalancing the routes of the trucks plying the streets.

Welcome to Confetti Junction,
careless planning has created a few useless roads.