There’s no stopping the steady stream of roguelite releases, as the familiar formula is applied in both expected and unexpected ways. This time, it’s trains that are getting the roguelite treatment complete, with permadeath and meta progression. Do you want a train with circular saws rotating around one carriage, a machine gun shooting from another, and a laser on the next? You should, because otherwise the waves of monsters will destroy it before it reaches the next station! How will you buy more guns for your train then?
Endless Rails is a novel set up. You start with just a locomotive that has a drone on it as your first point of defence, and you can thankfully move it around as it automatically fires at enemies in range. What follows is a very brief trip along an endless rail – shocking, I know – while enemies enter from the edges of the screen to destroy your train. If they do, it’s game over and back to the menu for another run, but when you kill them they’ll drop a bunch of coins that you should probably grab with your drone. You can also speed up and slow down a bit to move the train away from anything that’s about to hit it, hopefully buying you time to get your drone over there and stop it.
Once you reach a station, you can buy stuff. You’ll get more than just a coffee and a muffin at these stations though, with the shop offering the aforementioned machine guns, lasers, and other weapons, as well upgrades that can improve the stats or add elemental damage, improve your drone’s coin gathering range, and more. Each car has only one slot, but elemental buffs apply to adjacent cars, and you can start to combine cars of the same size to gain a further stat boost and pool their equipment slots, up until you’ve got a car with four spots.
It takes a couple of stations for cars to be combined, and the more cars makes your train bigger and easier to hit, so there’s quite a few of considerations to be made and risks to take, but it’s well worth it for your run.
There are other related complications as well, like a piece of equipment that gives you a bonus for delivering it to the next station, or one that gets more valuable for every station you go through with it, allowing you to sell it when something really great comes along. Provided you keep it all safe, of course.
This mechanic is honestly quite brilliant and I think could have really made the game excellent, but it’s also the only part of the game that truly feels inspired. The weapons are all a bit bland, and there aren’t enough to feel like you’ve got a lot of variety and options. The more interesting ones are flamethrowers and icethrowers, and a lightning spire that chains to others, but it feels like you’ve seen everything after only a few hours and you’re just going through the same thing over and over.
This isn’t helped by the core gameplay, which is just about the most repetitive a roguelite I’ve played. The waves of enemies are identical every time you play and shifting your train side to side on a straight rail whilst moving your drone around gets old very quickly. Other roguelites have differing maps and layouts, enemy variety, weapon variety – Monsters Are Coming! Rock and Road has a similar premise, with much more build variety as you construct a rolling city – but there’s very little of that on offer here. Then there’s the spectre of RNG hanging over everything, which regularly doesn’t offer me any weapons in the first two stations, completely ruining the chances of a decent run.
Other than that, the train looks good enough and the effects when it brakes and speeds up a decent, but it’s otherwise uninspired visually as well. The enemies in particular look quite generic whilst the environment is sparse and going by at speed anyway. Similarly, the music gets old pretty quickly.
