Trainz: A New Era

My grandson really into trains gives this two thumbs up

Description said it would work in the United states, however there is 3 on the back which means it is zoned for Europe and it is not compatible with my son's computer. I have a very disappointed child.

Very difficult playing the game. Completing train driving sessions impossible. Unclear indications or directions. Program appears buggy to me. Graphics are quite nice. I would not purchase this program if given a second chance.

I had weeks of trouble and back-and-forth with customer support to get this working, but now that it is, I mostly like it.Be aware that this product DOES NOT WORK as advertised out of the box. You must go through a lengthy process of downloading very large patches. Then, installing each patch requires meticulous perfection even though the instructions are far from clear. Email to customer support has about a two-day turnaround and often consists of dismissive responses like "try rebooting". But with persistence eventually I found the correct series of patches and got clarification about which must be installed first, second etc.Make a full backup of your hard drive before attempting to install. Verify that the backup works by restoring it, ideally to a separate disk. Only then attempt your first install, because when it derails (haha) you will want to clean up by restoring that disk backup. And again, and again. I had three spare disks to experiment with. I don't know if I would have ever succeeded otherwise.The debugging messages are worse than useless. I don't recall the exact text but you see things like "Now on step 4. This may take a long time. Do not cancel or your installation will be destroyed." So I left it waiting overnight; it never finished leaving me no choice but to cancel despite the warning. In fact (I later learned) it was hung up on a problem with the graphics card driver which had to be updated. A clue would have been very nice thank you.Despite claiming to work on lower-end graphics cards, the frame rate can be slow (<5 FPS) and you'll have to disable a lot of features (shadows, post-processing...) to get anywhere. And as for the graphics built in to your motherboard: forget it.Once you get it working it meets most expectations, although core functions like laying track or adjusting the height of an object can be a real pain. To be fair to the Trainz people, this is a recent and total rewrite of their product so it has a lot of future potential but loads of current bugs. Most of them are tolerable but far from ideal. Ultimately, I enjoy using the software but it is taking me a long time to learn workarounds for the many quirks.

I enjoy the game and it works well on my Dell XPS 8700. I would prefer that I could use my Raildriver console with the game. The manufacturer says they working with Auran to make their console compatible with the software. Otherwise, I'd say I like the game as well as I enjoy Train Simulator 2015. Both are good products with slightly different spins on the same sort of railroad simulator.

My son loves this game.

I was very happy

Have tried to play 5 different simulations and haven't finished one yet. Either get to the place where your pick up cars and you're locked out of the track switch or encounter a red signal and never changes.

Thank you Got in mail today !