Enginefall is as a lot about fabricating bandages and constructing hovels as it’s about mad locomotive sci-fi, however upon being invited to check out an early construct, its idea proved compelling sufficient to punch by my survival crafting fatigue like a runaway… I dunno, bus. Mainly it’s a first-person Snowpiecer-em up, the place a typical session sees postapocalypse survivors raiding monumental trains, combating (or becoming a member of forces) from tail to tip to usurp the conductor’s place and steal valuable gasoline cores earlier than escaping again to their very own personal engine.
Once more, I like the thought. I particularly like that Enginefall isn’t massively fussed the way you take care of different Tailies – alliances, truces, and armed banditry are all permitted and accommodated for. What I performed final week, sadly, was awkward, janky, and undercooked, to the purpose the place the one factor extra bold than the sport’s railriding idea is perhaps its Q1 2026 launch plan.
I particularly joined a Titan practice mission. Raids in opposition to smaller, player-owned Marauder trains might be doable, however are meant as extra of a late-game endeavour. The megavehicle itself was a pleasant piece of linear action-arena work. Your path to the conductor’s workplace means advancing by the three major passenger courses, making for distinct development from third class’ filthy on-rails slums to the opulent art-deco lounges and leafy pleasure gardens of top notch.
Whereas every class is gated by keycard-locked doorways, the intervening carriages are large and tall sufficient to offer a selection of routes by. You would, for instance, strive sneaking by a lower-level upkeep sector, when you don’t fancy a firefight within the busier passenger quarters – although the Shinkansen this ain’t, and toxic emissions imply you’ll must spend a while scavving for components, constructing a base, and crafting a gasoline masks if you wish to take the quiet strategy.
Therefore, survival crafting. It’s cute how the higher tiers of your tech tree unlock as you push by every carriage class, letting you ditch your shitty plastic pistols for the higher crust’s assault rifles. Even so, this facet of Enginefall comes throughout as fairly skinny, or at worst, actively boring. Gathering sources both takes an age, because it does when sledgehammering plastic out of the practice’s chairs, or is trivially straightforward, like when a brand new room opens to disclose piles of steel and chemical substances strewn throughout the ground.
Base constructing doesn’t have a lot architectural meat to it, both. I can recognize the novelty of those strongholds being transient – the place a Rust or Minecraft base is meant to be treasured and guarded in any respect prices, Enginefall forces you to ditch and rebuild each time you attain a brand new class. The catch of this purely utilitarian mindset, although, is that each base my crew constructed was ugly, structurally bland, and solely ever sufficiently big to carry some crafting benches and bedrolls for respawn factors. It’s one thing you’d do as a result of it’s essential, not since you’d wish to.
The shortage of extra partaking or adventurous resource-gathering additionally shortly made it clear that one of the best ways to get geared is to only shoot individuals and take their stuff. A fact which, because it has in lots of survival video games earlier than it, might undermine the potential for extra attention-grabbing interactions, like silent stand-offs or uneasy team-ups.
That mentioned, I did get to get pleasure from a few these moments throughout my raid. On a scavenging run for the supplies we’d must craft a firstclass ticket, we have been startled by a lone survivor who’d adopted us all the way down to the practice’s well-hidden furnace space. She had the drop on us however, seeing she was outnumbered, provided us her personal ticket in change for us leaving peacefully. A deal we gladly accepted, solely realising later that we’d primarily mugged somebody by chance. Later, in want of extra power to breach the conductor’s locked-down headquarters, we approached, quietly surrounded, and “recruited” one other straggler into our ranks. That one was on function.
Nonetheless, given how a lot faster and simpler it’s to collect loot by homicide, I fear that Enginefall’s social aspect might undergo the identical destiny as DayZ’s: tense, unpredictable, extremely anecdote-able encounters giving method to bland kill-on-sight deathmatching. The spirit of cooperation (or, on the very least, coexisting) exhibiting by in a recreation filled with devs and journos is one factor, however will it survive in a mic-less pub recreation atmosphere? I’m undecided.
Both means, Enginefall might need a good greater downside: it simply doesn’t really feel that good. The gunplay lacks drama, even with the upgraded weapons within the posh part. Base constructing, within the confines of siderooms and storage cabinets, is fiddly. Efficiency is sluggish and uneven, even on my RTX 3090 operating at an upscaled 1440p, although that naturally may not be the case at launch.
Contemplating it’s the sport’s major hook, I’d have additionally preferred a a lot stronger sense of truly being on a practice. The Snowpiercer movie was shot by constructing practice carriage units on prime of gyroscopic gimbals, to authentically recreate the results of excessive velocity rail journey on Chris Evans. Enginefall, nevertheless, barely manages a rumbly sound impact. You wouldn’t even know you have been on a practice all through most of third and second class, except you caught a glimpse of the wrecked Earth whizzing by by one in every of their tiny home windows.
I nonetheless assume there’s a decent action-survival recreation in right here. Placing the improvised tooling-up and anarchic, sandboxy participant interplay of an countless PvP sim right into a raid construction – one with a transparent starting, center, and finish – stays an intriguing concept, and the setting is exclusive amongst video games, if not technically authentic. However navigating Enginefall’s most central techniques simply isn’t that enjoyable proper now, and retooling them with lower than half a yr to go could be an enormous ask. Possibly not Titan huge. However Flying Scotsman huge, for positive.
