The film Snowpiercer and the book it was based on have had a huge impact on the sci-fi genre that followed, even if it’s a slightly less-noticed legacy. The concept of a train racing through apocalyptic snowstorms to keep its passengers alive is a truly unique one, and it has captivated the imagination of fans to this day.
Nowhere is this more clear than in EverRail, which launched into Early Access just a few months ago and takes obvious inspiration from the aforementioned cult-classic sci-fi film.
EverRail is an open-world survival crafting game set in a frozen apocalypse, where your train and your willingness to fight for it are the only things keeping you and your passengers from a freezing demise. The gameplay loop is pretty simple: you have a train, your only means of traveling the map without freezing to death, some survivors who need to be kept alive, and a list of craftable goods along with the ability to research more. Crafting items requires resources, which you can only find in the many ruins littering the frozen landscape. To keep yourself stocked with food and scrap, you must ride the tracks, stop at various ruins, and loot to your heart’s content, all without succumbing to the elements or the deadly robots in your way.
It is a very interesting premise, injected into a genre that desperately needs fresh ideas. As far as open-world survival craft titles go, I would go so far as to say that EverRail is the most thematically unique of its kind, at least among those that I can think of.
The game plays around with a few interesting ideas, too. Your train has a battery, which can only be charged by moving, giving you a limited amount of time to loot each location you explore and lending the title a sort of mini-extraction shooter feel. The amount of survivors kept alive on your train represents the number of respawns you have available, so rescuing more and taking care of your survivors has a real, tangible benefit outside of the game’s immersion. Navigating the train tracks is interesting because different tracks can only support certain speeds, meaning you cannot just run your train at full speed and forget about it.
Interesting as many of these ideas may be, I can’t yet say EverRail is in a state I would play, or even really recommend, because the game’s problems unfortunately outweigh its original ideas.
Right off the bat, I really didn’t like the game’s UI design. It simply isn’t very intuitive, feels rather slow to navigate, and doesn’t easily convey the information it’s meant to. I will be the first to admit that I’m no UI designer, nor do I know the particular sciences behind what makes a UI work versus what doesn’t, but my impression of the UI in EverRail was that it was too large, too bulky, and awkwardly shaped. It also used awkward icons and poor color choices that made it hard for me to tell what I was looking at half the time.
The game’s gunplay is also basic to a fault, reminding me of a somehow less reactive and intuitive version of the guns in Garry’s Mod. I will say, however, that some of the robots gave excellent feedback when being shot, which made the game’s laser weapons feel particularly punchy and satisfying to use, even if their mechanics were otherwise really basic.
With gunplay that isn’t exciting, the overall gameplay loop becomes even more boring, especially when you realize there is hardly any depth to progression or exploration. The game quickly becomes a rotation of the same behavior: find an area, loot it, take the supplies, and craft new gear. This loop is fun on its own if it had a greater goal to add to it, or something else to discover in the world. Instead, it’s just repetitive, and I was feeling that repetition by the third area I explored.
The game’s basic resource management doesn’t make it any more appealing. Hunger hits you fast, and many looting runs leave you with barely anything to show for your efforts by way of resources gathered. Tedious and, again, repetitive is how I would describe the bare-bones gameplay loop of discovering an area, looting essentially the same stuff over and over again, and fighting the same enemies in the process.
On top of this, the game has its bugs, though that is to be expected in an Early Access title. One such bug had my first death load me into a death loop, where hitting the “load last save” button put me in the nanoseconds before my train crashed. I experienced several more bugs, ranging from mildly inconvenient to game-breaking, but this was the one most worth noting. Again, the game is in Early Access, so I expect these bugs to be worked on over time, if nothing else is.
EverRail injects some fun ideas into a genre that desperately needs fresh perspectives. However, in its current Early Access state, the game is incredibly bare-bones and quickly loses its appeal as it becomes repetitive. While I wouldn’t recommend the game in its current state, I advise anyone interested to keep an eye on it throughout development, as EverRail has the potential to become something truly special in its genre. It is just going to take some work to get there.
Pros:
- A fresh take on the survival-craft genre
- Some unique takes on genre mechanics
Cons:
- Extremely bare-bones in the current Early Access build, which makes the game feel repetitive quickly
- Gunplay is simple to a fault
- Poor UI
- Basic, at times cheap-feeling resource management
Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC Early Access Review of EverRail. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page!
Comments