Sometimes you just need to do evil for your own enjoyment.
The latest game of mine to join the 100% achievement club is Train Station Renovation, it’s the kind of game that I tell my brother in law that I’m playing and he looks at me like I’ve had a stroke. I don’t think he believed me when I first said that the game existed, but then he started talking about how it’s the kind of game that “non-gamers” play and I have to disagree. Only the most hardcore play games like Train Station Renovation.
Train Station Renovation is a game where you renovate train stations. I love it. The core gameplay loops is just sort of going around doing predetermined chores and just relaxing while you do it. You pick up trash, scrub grafiti, clean cobwebs, replace furniture, fix things, etc. Oddly enough the developers at Live Motion Games set it up so you actually do less as you go on. Live Motion Games never really figured out how to properly develop a game because they’re too busy rolling out gimmick simulator games on a sweatshop-level speed.
I’m not kidding either. Live Motion Games has nearly a dozen titles listed as “coming soon,” and it’s every coked up nightmare you could think of from bakery simulator to Rescue Medic, Car Trader Simulator, Chernobyl Liquidators Simulator, Drunk Santa Simulator. I have several of them on my wishlist.
Whoever did the art for the grafiti did a fantastic job. I actually felt bad having to scrub some of the paintings from the walls of the train stations.
There is an odd, fantastical aspect to the game that gives each level its own story and gimmick. For instance in one level you’re cleaning a station that was being used to illegally dump toxic waste. So you have to put on a hazmat suit and gather the barrels and then clean the green toxic spillage with a spray gun. Another level is set on a station where someone was murdered and there is a comedic number of knives strewn around that the police evidently did not take, surrounding the splatters of blood that you have to scrub off.
Every level gives five stars that can be spent upgrading your gear. You don’t have to upgrade your items, in fact the game gives you an achievement for completing it without doing so, and all it does is decrease the time that performing actions takes. You also get rewarded in a ton of cash for correctly separating your waste which is good because you’re paying for renovation furniture out of pocket.
My favorite bit about the game is that the item placement has no context and gives you complete freedom to basically recreate those construction fail memes. Every room that needs items will give you a generic category and how many you need to place.
So I had a lot of fun. In one level I replaced all of the toilets in the women’s restroom with urinals. I also placed automatic air-blowing hand dryers above all of the urinals in the men’s room and placed the toilet behind a maze of restroom dividers. On another level I had the benches dangerously close to the edge of the railway platform. You obviously never see the railroads in action after you renovate them, but the headcanon is worth it.
Now let’s talk the negatives. The game is horribly optimized with stuttering everywhere. There are a lot of little bugs that don’t directly interfere with completing the game because the game has a tendency to screw up if you save, leave, and then load the level. Lights stop working, doors don’t function, the radar doesn’t pick up certain item types, etc.
I will also say that the final level is where I turned on this game and completely soured my experience, doubly so when I had to play the game through a second time. Every level in this game has a good mixture of activities except for the final level that consists of nothing but buying and placing down hundreds upon hundreds of items in areas that don’t give you really much creative space. It is BORING. It’s a reminder that the only thing separating this game from a grating sack of trash is the variety of things to do in each level.
I had to play through twice to complete the separation achievement (which is called “segregation expert” and all I have to say on that is yikes) and completing the game without upgrading any tools. The first playthrough took about 9 hours and the second took 4 because I spent more time in the first playthrough screwing around and having fun with my item placement and the second time I just didn’t care. I also stopped caring about the stars since I couldn’t upgrade items in the second playthrough so I just did the minimum work and moved on.
The folks at Live Motion Games are also actually listening to players. In the time since this game has come out they have fixed some bugs, added in a sandbox mode, and are working on adding the ability to replay levels which you can’t do right now.
Train Station Renovation is $14.99 on Steam. It also has a demo.
MMO Fallout 