they... did it? they banned the bots? this game is playable again? I missed it.

If you ask me, CS2 is a monumental step in the right direction for the future of Counter-Strike. The graphics upgrade from the new engine is long overdue, and the game feels significantly more friendly to get into than CSGO. Although it's still missing features, you can see the team is hard at work to bring these back and to improve upon them. So if you don't like the game, take a break and try again later. To everyone else: Enjoy a really well done rework of the core gameplay.

I've bought this game while it was in fairly early access, a lot has changed since then. The devs have always been putting in new features, optimizing existing ones, even maintaining a native modloading tool, listening to the community.

But let's talk features.
Rail Route is a simplistic, yet incredibly complex game about being a train dispatcher. You get a schedule, you get control over the rail network. It's your job to schedule all trains to arrive on time. Simple, right?

In Endless Mode, you develop your own network of stations, lay your own tracks, manage your own contracts and do everything at your own pace. This is the "default" and most relaxing experience from the offered game modes. It even allows you to develop your own automation strategies for your network!

In Timetable mode, every second counts. Get points for scheduling your fleet according to the timetable, get points deducted if trains have to wait, and try to stay on top of things.

In Rush Hour mode, every realtime second counts - there's no pause button! With every wave, the amount of trains increases, and you'll desperately try to dispatch them to their stations on time. And to top it all off, there's also a leaderboard for that. So watch chaos ensue, or try to stand tall and compete on the leaderboards.

The game also ships a very intuitive, albeit at first intimidating level editor. You can create your own maps, schedule your own trains, and set them up for every game mode as you please. Let your creative passion flow, or recreate the local train schedule - the choice is all yours!

Let's talk rating. I've personally spent a good amount of hours on this game that unfortunately Steam didn't track due to "offline mode". But it's a really great game to wait time out and to just relax. The modding community continuously releases new mods to extend the game, the devs keep adding new features and work with their community, and the mappers create custom maps. All of those feature deliver a very consistent relaxing experience that I can only highly recommend.

4/5 Gameplay - simple, but keeps you going
3/5 Soundtrack - it's not bad, but eventually becomes repetitive
5/5 Design - The game looks clean and timeless, and the devs have already announced they want to keep it like that.
4/5 Fun - Some aspects still require refining, but that's to be expected from an early access game. The other parts - automation and scheduling, are incredibly fun already and are still being refined to this day!
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16/20 Total - I highly recommend this game as I expect this game to become even more fun in the future.

Final words: This game is early access and was developed by a small indie team. Some things aren't perfect, and that's to be expected. Ymmv!

This is nothing for a Metal Gear Diehard fan. But if you're open for something new and like the idea of building your base to fight a bunch of zombies, this game is actually really good :)

If your answer to "How many technic mods do you want?" is "Yes", then this game might actually be good for you.

I wish Steam had a neutral review option. Unfortunately, this game has such a huge performance issue that to me it was unplayable and caused motion sickness within 5 minutes. Didn't even get to leave the starting area. FPS dropped below 20 on an RTX2060, overclocked, and an AMD Threadripper with 4GHz. I'll keep an eye on it, but unfortunately right now I can't recommend it.