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Choo-Choo Charles review: off the rails survival horrorBig Train
Big Train
Speaking as a grown-ass man, I love trains. Not to the extent that I will ever bother to learn anything about them, or to identify one with any more specificity than “the pointy type”, “the blunt type” and “the chugga chugga choo choo all-aboard type”, but to the far milder extent that I simply enjoy watching them whizz around the place like big metal worms, and hearing their various little noises and honks. It’s trains!
Choo-Choo Charles - Release Date TrailerWatch on YouTube
Choo-Choo Charles - Release Date Trailer
Is it any good? Well no, it’s endearingly shonky, very short and frustrating to play for any length of time. Sorry to be a blunt train about it. Choo-Choo Charles is a figment of a memory of a meme, extruded through the sparkling mind of a one-man development team, a person brilliant and dedicated enough to see their silly little idea through to completion.
Anyway, here’s how it works. You have your own armoured train, which isn’t alive, but which lets you ride around the small island on a series of interconnected railway tracks. This is your base of operations as you travel between a handful of optional NPCs and four main-quest NPCs. In very short order you learn that this accursed island is home to Charles, a maniacal arachnid train who appears every five to ten minutes to get you.
At first, Charles gets you every time. Your train has a gun mounted on the back, which you can use to shave millimetres off the monster’s health bar as he chases you up and down the tracks. The gun overheats quickly enough that firing rounds into the horrible train-creature’s grinning face is slightly less fun than just giving up and succumbing to his murderous embrace. Dying robs you of a couple of pieces of scrap — the currency of the game found littered all over the place — but otherwise no progress is lost.
On foot you stand a better chance of survival, as the enormous spider-train is unable to cope with navigating its way around such obstacles as small piles of bricks and front porches. Watching Charles flailing around outside of a shack, he suddenly seems pathetic and small, his wretched legs glitching through walls, his rictus grin and plate-sized eyes looking increasingly like this foul creature is hiding some deep, underlying sadness. Pity Charles, the spider train cursed with just enough artificial intelligence to want to murder you, but not enough to be able to walk up a step.
A few hours is all it takes to scoop up the game’s main objectives, and not much longer to polish off the optional quests. These give you new weapons for your train and enough scrap to complete all three upgrades, which is effectively required to successfully duel Charles. These optional quests are limited in their scope and variety, and tend to boil down to fetching an object from a few hundred metres away, or a bit of tedious platforming. The voice acting and crude animation is adorably goofy, and the environments you’re tootling around in lack much detail or personality — the island is a kind of homogenous, sparse, muddy forest with very few points of interest to differentiate one part of the map from another.
