An Inspired Bullet Heaven Roguelike That Runs Out Of Tracks
I find it easy to get other people excited about Endless Rails. It’s Snowpiercer: The Roguelike. It’s a Mad Max action sequence through the medium of bullet heaven games. I show my mates screenshots of the bold, thickly outlined world – an apocalypse as a pop-up book – and it’s an almost guaranteed wishlist addition.
Checking those screenshots, you might be mistaken in thinking that the train is the main thing you control in Endless Rails. You can control it, shunting it slowly backwards and forwards, but these controls play an increasingly small role in the game. If you need to move your train, you’re probably on the way to failing.
Droning On And On And On
Most of the time, you are controlling your drone(s). It hovers above your train, and you send it hurtling out to the demons that look to destroy you. Those demons can’t damage your drone – you can merrily blip through them without consequence – but they absolutely can destroy the train, and once its health has completely gone then the run is over.
Your drone attacks automatically as soon as an enemy is in proximity, picking the closest one first. This is nothing new for anyone who has played a bullet heaven game like Vampire Survivors. It might seem lacking in excitement or strategy, but that’s not how it plays out. There’s strategy in which enemy you prioritise, and the sheer volume of enemies means that the action is tense.
As we mentioned, Endless Rails is a roguelike, so you’re going to die at some point. The aim is to get as far down the track as possible before that happens, and the track is broken into stops. After defeating wave after wave of floating-head enemies, you rock up to a station and enter the shop. All of the coins that popped out of the enemies can be spent on improvements to your train.
You Could Leave Me Building Carriages Forever
This is where Endless Rails absolutely sings. It has a singular, brilliant idea that makes me chef’s kiss. To improve your train, you need to attach carriages, and those carriages cost money. They also make your train a bigger target, so there’s always a nagging thought in the back of your mind that you are overplaying your hand. Just how long should your train be?
Each carriage comes with an empty slot. In that slot, you can socket cargo. There are turrets that fire from the back of the train, and they come in a variety of assortments like lightning cannons, ice turrets and shotguns. There are crates that apply benefits to the carriages that surround them, increasing damage or broadening their range. There are supporting benefits, like increasing your collection range for coins, multiplying the coins you get, and increasing the train’s health, as well as extra drones, supplementing the one that you control with your cursor.
I love how your perks and bonuses are physically represented on the train. You’re not gaining an invisible stat-boost: you’re getting an actual carriage, dangling on the back of your train. But, what catapults this genius further is that the order of your carriages matter.
All Aboard The Deathtrain
You probably want an even spread of turrets across your train, which is one lens on the carriage-order. Support carriages tend to boost the carriages in front and behind them, so you want to be adding a ‘freeze effect’ carriage next to a rifle-turret, for example. And if that sounds limiting, then you can merge your carriages together. Two carriages of the same size can be combined (although you have to wait one or two stations for it to take effect), which shortens the train length, as well as broadening the perimeter of your support benefits.
I wave generally at the past few paragraphs and say ‘this is awesome’. I love the carriage-building aspect of Endless Rails. I adore grabbing a money-making node early, so that I can start combining carriages as soon as possible. If I’m not chaining lightning between enemies, and slowing them with ice-infused rifle fire, then I have done something wrong. I’m constantly micro-managing my train, making sure that I am maximising effects. In the late-game, I’m selling off support nodes to add more and more drones, creating a circle of death.
Studio Monoblock have hit upon something brilliant here. Making a build is majestic. And the bullet-heaven gameplay isn’t overly complex, but supports it. You can feel that joyful ‘heaven’ sensation as all your perks combine and the screen lights up with the death of your enemies.
Let Me Kickstart Some DLC, Dammit!
There is a ‘but’, I am afraid. Studio Monoblock have created a fantastic engine, but they haven’t been given much fuel to keep it running. Endless Rails feels like an Early Access game in some aspects: it’s just not got enough in its tanks to last particularly long. You could treat it as a finite, bitesize roguelike that doesn’t demand all your time, but I wanted to play for longer. I felt like I wasn’t done.
Almost every aspect of Endless Rails feels thinner than it needs to be. There are only three trains to unlock, and that happens very early. They’re not particularly distinctive: they have special abilities and different weapons, but the carriages and cargo you buy are identical, and they all play in much the same way.
The upgrade tree is welcome but stunted. There are only ten unlocks per train. They don’t overlap, either: if you’ve sunk credits into completing one train’s tree, then you’re not getting much benefit for the other trains. I stuck to one train at a time, as it was the optimal way to play. Keep playing as your best train, and you gain the most credits for upgrades.
There are only twenty stages and two bosses. Those bosses are guaranteed: you’re not getting a random allocation of one or the other. There are a fair few enemies, but they mostly just sponge bullets to different degrees. But what hurts Endless Rails the most is that there’s a relatively small pool of cargo for your carriages. It’s not really possible to create ‘builds’, as such, as you will be seeing the same small roster of turrets and support benefits.
Not Quite So Endless, Then
There are two ways to look at it, I suppose. The optimist would say that Endless Rails respects your time. It’s a roguelike that doesn’t demand twenty hours of play, and that should probably be respected. The pessimist would look at the brilliant build and progression systems in Endless Rails and wonder why no-one filled them with content. That pessimist would probably have paid a whole lot more for a bigger game.
I’m more pessimist than optimist, but I can see both sides. Endless Rails is inspired: or, at the very least, creating a build is inspired. Physically representing all the perks and improvements on a train and then asking you to protect it in a bullet heaven is the stuff of brilliance. I just wish that Studio Monoblock had more time or resources to feed their ideas. There’s just not enough here – not the skill tree, not the upgrades, not the levels – to give the design the support it deserves.
I’m going to cross my fingers and hope that Endless Rails does so well that more content gets added in the future. For now, Endless Rails is a short-haul journey, rather than long-haul.
Important Links
Buy from Steam – https://store.steampowered.com/app/4601120/Endless_Rails/
