There are plenty of train games in existence on PC, with many either aiming for realistic recreations of driving trains like Train Simulator or Train Sim World, and others looking to a more top-down view like Transport Tycoon, Sweet Transit, or Railroad Corporation 2. Then there are games like puzzle sequel Unrailed 2 Back on Track, which is all about laying rails but in the most chaotic way possible. It’s out now in Steam Early Access, and it’s off to a strong start.
If you’re not familiar with either Unrailed or Unrailed 2 Back on Track, they work like this. You’re in charge of a train determined to head between locations, delivering freight. The chaos creeps in when you realize that you have to lay the train tracks while the train is coming – fast. In the tradition of the best puzzle games, you have to think quickly but clearly in order to clear a route, slap down tracks, defeat monsters, deal with threats, and make sure your cargo gets where it’s going in one piece.
Thankfully you don’t have to go alone as Unrailed 2 is also a co-op game, so you and a few friends can run about like headless chickens trying to get everything in place before the chugging locomotive gets here. There’s even a multiplayer option, where different co-op teams can face off against each other to climb their way up an online leaderboard. With tons of equipment, characters, train wagons, biomes, and more to choose from, there’s loads of repeatable depth to delve into too.
Unrailed 2 Back on Track is out now in Steam Early Access. Briefly at launch it looked like it was heading in the wrong direction, with a ‘mixed’ rating on the platform, but it’s since recovered and at the time of writing is in the ‘very positive’ category with 87% of all reviews praising the game.
It’s also managed to pull together a respectable player base already, with a 24-hour peak of 1,670 concurrent people playing at the same time. While that’s behind its predecessor’s all-time peak of 9,852, it’s understandable given that this is an early access launch during a very busy period in the gaming world. There’s still plenty of time for Unrailed 2 to arrive at the station ahead of its predecessor, and if reviews keep going the way they have been, it might just pull it off.
If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can head over to Steam to check out the game for yourself, and if you’d like to play something else you can take a look at our guide to the best train games on PC.
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