I played several hours of Unrailed! as a single-player experience, and in that brief period of time I got pretty good with my own railway-building skills, as well as micromanaging my robot’s tasks and contributions. Relying solely on one’s self in this tense little game fosters a unique mentality, for better and for worse. For better in that, well, you get better at Unrailed! But for worse in that things are slightly different once you start to play with other living, breathing railroaders.
The biggest difference, of course, is the exclusion of the robot A.I. This is a bit of a hurdle initially, but if you and your partner(s) gel and get a good flow, then baby, you’ve got a stew going. Of course, if you’re playing on Nintendo Switch, as I am, you have to work past the hurdle of getting a voice chat going so you can verbally strategize. Especially considering the emote communication option in Unrailed! is both hilarious and hilariously useless.
You really think I’m paying attention to the area immediately surrounding the other player character’s head enough to see the wood bubble they’re “thinking” in order to realize on the fly that they want me to chop wood?
But even with a good working relationship and solid communication, things can still go off the rails at the drop of a hat. Half-Glass Gaming owner (and all-around good guy) Josh and I were playing together and had a few good laughs at how quickly Unrailed! railroads you.
Pretty quickly, Josh and I hit a good groove, and we really began to wreck shop.
One pro tip is to stockpile tracks by the end depot before you finish the final piece of track in your railroad masterpiece, which will give you a nice leg up once the next section starts and you already have tracks ready to lay. Because, as is often the case, Unrailed! might start you with your back up against the wall — perhaps a dense forest or a literal wall of solid rock.
During the last game of our season, Josh got stuck on a the bridge we were making, completely cut off from the rear of the train and all of the resources, utensils, and track pieces we had stockpiled on my side of the train. So as I frantically attempted to cut wood to make another bridge path to try to rescue him, we learned it was possible to hand stuff to one of the squares he could reach, just over the edge of the train and impeding landscape. This bought us a few precious extra seconds to attempt a rally, but I couldn’t Michael Jordan my way out of that one. I also failed to remember the perfectly good and much-needed pile of wood I’d chopped earlier, instead attempting to cut down more trees in a frenzied rush.
Our train crashed and burned and all was lost. Even so, I can’t wait to jump back into Unrailed! for another couple of rounds. I’ve said it before, but I am hooked.
All aboard!!
