"Paper Train Traffic" is the PC port of Paper Train HD, a tablet/smartphone game. I grabbed it as part of a series of bundles over on indiegala some time ago.

It starts off great. And then becomes work. And then you want to smash a head against a wall due to unexpected randomisation.

Paper Train Traffic uses a drawn on paper style of artwork, beyond the levels of Transplan or even Dragon. Here we have nice clean and detailed art in blue pen that shows the area of the map you are in and the various tracks and trains that you need to control.

I swear I've also played games like this on Kongregate with a much shorter subset of levels, but being able to run in x1080 and escaping the limits of a web browser and flash allows greater visual fidelity to the game.

The aim here is simple. Get all trains off the map without them colliding with one another. You can toggle traffic lights to cause trains to break and stop or flip switches to change paths. Or hold a boost button to cause them to run faster while the rest of the game runs at normal speed.

Get all trains to the end and under a timelimit and win stars to show your proficiency. There's no bonus unlocks that I could find here, they're mainly for achievements.

Regardless if you crash or win, you can replay the level immediately or later on via a level select.

On the VERY FIRST LEVEL the max I could manage was two stars out of three as I was always under the first tier limit. After a dozen attempts I gave up and moved on, getting three stars on the next half dozen levels with ease.

This should not happen. Really, regardless of how you are aiming the game, having such a close limit for failing on the first round can easily put off casual completionist players. I was able to go back to it later and win the level, but it is always frustrating when you can't do the first one in one go.

Aside from some awful difficulty spikes throughout the game, there's really not much too this one.

As the game progresses it becomes more of a chore to work your way through. Working out each map becomes less fun and more feels like tedious work.

As nice as the level appearance is, the actual gameplay does not translate well to a PC over a touch screen where you can tap screen icons quickly. I know, the horror the horror, but somehow when ported to a large screen with much more travel for a mouse cursor the game begins to break down as a port.

There is also a small amount of randomisation in the timing of trains and number of carriages. At first I thought this was down to how the boost button works...

Since it speeds up the individual trains on the map and their release period, and not game time speed you can end up with trains running into the rear of each other or arriving at traffic stops at what feels like different times from previous runs.

A slight difference in holding down space can make it feel like the level is playing out differently than it really is.

However, the game will push out different carriage lengths sometimes. If you had a 3-3-5-3 set in the first few tries, it is totally possible to get a 2-2-3-5 run on the following one. All that time you trained yourself on when to hit buttons? Throw it all out, because it will not work. And sometimes it can make a map unwinnable. Great eh?

While I can't personally recommend this one due to the issues I had with it, it is only $2 and can fill in some time if you like this style of game.

Though to be honest, the more I played the more I went from liking it to outright hating it.

Game Acquisition: IndieGala (bundle).
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 30 April 2017
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS: Windows Vista
Processor: 1.0 GHz Processor
Memory: 1024 MB RAM
Graphics: OpenGL 2.0 compatible graphics
Storage: 150 MB available space
Sound Card: OpenAL compatible sound card