Create goods via different stations that rely on each other! Good gameplay, supported by a friendly community.

Every level is a puzzle: several towns require goods in order to finish the level. Those towns produce workers, which are required in most crafting stations. For instance, if the town needs glass, you first send workers to a sand excavation station. There workers are converted into sand over time. The sand then is transported to the glass factory, along with a new supply of workers. Finally the glass is transported to the town. The ratio is always 1:1. So before you start the level you can calculate how many workers need to go where.
Aside from finishing the level, there are goals to earn stars. Stars unlock locomotive skins and achievements only. Three stars are awarded for beating the level in three margins of time. And two times one star is awarded for variable goals, such as not stopping trains, or not arriving at wrong stations. Unless you crash the final product, the times are never an issue. The other goals can be tricky. When you finish a level with five stars, your ingame time, money left, and realtime time is compared to other players as a percentage.

Besides the 50 levels from the base game, there is a large community publishing levels in the Steam Workshop. It works pretty well!

The developers organise a weekly competition for the community. They nominate a level from the community, and the players compete for the fastest ingame time. Usually between 70-150 join in on the competition. The top three and several random players are rewarded a physical card via the (oldskool) mail, if they want. I have received one such card, and it's a very nice idea! All this is done via Discord. It's too bad this is not completely done via the game itself, but this is probably a resource and infrastructure issue.

When I started the game, I was very confused. From TV1 I learned to spam the trains as fast as possible from the stations. This game is totally different, which I knew in the back of my mind, the first reception of the game back when it launched was also confused. If you liked the first game that can be a thing, however I do applaud the devs for choosing a unique path.
Level design is very good! There is a lot of variety in levels, some have a script to alter the layout during playing. Fifty levels is guaranteed to provide many hours of entertainment!
The community is one of the friendliest on Steam! My TV2 Discord is always open, they only give an alert when a new challenge is issued.

Now some discomforts I have noticed.
- sometimes when you switch tracks you hear the switch sound, but the tracks don't change.
- in some angles the exits of the stations aren't visible or selectable. The levels in the game avoid these situations, but you can encounter player made levels that didn't avoid this situation.
- the game registers releasing of mousebuttons instead of mouseclicks. I find this weird. I even reinstalled TV1 to check, and that one does respond to clicks.
- the scoring is very vague. I wish it was just a scoreboard. Furthermore I would love to see a combination of ingame time and money left. Both are indications of efficiency. While a combination would make it more complicated, it would make it more interesting I think.
Games I enjoy and play thoroughly always make me more involved and critical, so in a way it's good to have these.

I enjoyed my playthrough very much, and I will stick around for the Let's Play Togethers! This sale I will get the DLC that adds passengers to the game! Good to mention that the DLC is not required to play levels of the community with elements of the DLC.
I can also recommend TV1. A very different game, but equally good!

86/100

My review of Train Valley 1!


If you end up buying this, or already own it, I would be honoured if want to play a level I created! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2489501218