Enginefall’s greatest strength based on the limited time I had with it is that it doesn’t have that immediate signature identity of survival extraction battle royale-y sorts of games that it resembles on paper. The Tarkov or Fortnite experience might not get you as far as it would out of the gates in other games. This early learning curve comes from equal parts creative systems that create a faster and more dangerous pace than others, but the amount of all the little things you’ll need to learn to make good choices is intimidating.
Every run on the Titan Train starts a similar way: raiders, either by themselves or in crews of up to five, start at the back of the colossal city-state on rails. When the timer starts, it's off to the races, each party running, crafting, climbing, and shooting their way to the engine at the front of the train. It’s all very chaotic from start to finish, in ways that are fun and engaging, but also frustrating and confusing.
My group of five started hot out of the gate filling our pockets with as many scraps of metal and plastic we could find littering the ground, all important resources used to build bases and starting gear. We started with sledgehammers, useful for breaking the plastic off of the long plastic seats installed on the sides of the train, and busting up bundles of ceramic stuff into smaller, more useful pieces. These took more swings than expected to break off completely, but luckily each swing just put a bunch of plastic in your inventory and didn’t confetti to the ground for you to have to scoop up after. I felt extremely exposed breaking down this raw material, and if I didn’t have several people with me, there's no way I wouldn’t have been a victim. Solo players would likely have to approach this initial part more stealthfully, maybe missing out on gearing up early altogether.
Our first agenda, plotted by one of my team's developer-sherpas, Shaun “Flak” Stiglingh, was to find a cozy cabin of the train, reinforce the doors, and claim it as our first of likely several forward operating bases where we can store our plunder and upgrade our gear in relative safety. As he organized the resources we had, our second guide, Red Rover Interactive’s CEO Fred Richardson, led the rest of us out to find another good use for our sledgehammers, beating up other raiders and taking their stuff.
Eventually, we accumulated enough stuff to get some armor on our bodies and a layout of how the rest of our journey was going to proceed. This didn’t take a long time, and while the crafting menus and systems are pretty straightforward and serviceable, learning how to prioritize what you research and build first to get the best advantage seems like a daunting task only achievable through lots of trial and error. I was happy to let Flak handle it this time, as well as outline our strategy to get to the engine room. In order to get to the front of the train, we have to get keys that give us access to higher-class train cars (we start in 3rd, and need to work through 2nd, 1st, and eventually Conductor classes). We find these keys out there in the train cars we have access to already, be it among scraps, among loot in the assorted boxes tucked in every nook and cranny, or in the pockets of our rival raiders. Luckily, Fred’s previous hammer party produced a 2nd class ticket, so now all we had to do was get to the transfer gate without getting derailed.
He and Fred decided the best way to go would actually be through the lower decks, mentioning that each train car has several alternative routes that chain to one another, each with their own set of risks and benefits. Travelling in the rafters high above the main levels of the cars would keep you off of the ground, but the walkways are narrow and one fall would certainly kill you. Some cars give you the opportunity to leave the train completely, exposing you to the harsh climate of the wasteland around you, but giving you some deadly shortcuts that would certainly help make up some ground if you can survive it. Similar story with the lower decks, where the exhaust of the train is pumped through. Our path through the cars and up to the 2nd Class section would be more straight forward and hypothetically safer from enemies, but we would all need to acquire gas masks or risk a breathtaking death down below.
With a little more farming of both people and objects, we had the requisite masks. Down we went under the lower tunnels, which as predicted, went rather smoothly. We would have to pop back up to the main level to switch cars every so often, but we took the gassy express lane straight through 3rd Class, and eased into the next zone without many issues.
The 2nd Class car is where I found a lot of friction, mostly from the servers themselves. This was a stress test for the Red Rover Interactive, the largest they’d done yet. So I don’t fault them for my fate, which found me rubberbanding in stressful times like firefights and while collecting a treasure trove of goodies from a resource drop that I would eventually die in because I couldn’t tell if the escape I made in my time actually happened in the eyes of my party mates (it didn’t). I spent a good amount of time just unable to do much in the game at all, locked in a death screen while the pandemonium unfolded within earshot. Though I appreciated the opportunity to learn what it was probably like to be one of those ghosts on that train in Final Fantasy 6, it did mean that I missed almost all of the shenanigans that went down in the 2nd Class cars. I was revived and returned to working order eventually, just in time to make a frantic dash to the 1st Class section. Frantic because over time, the lower class cars get sealed off for good, a Fortnite storm ring sort of mechanic that forces all survivors to move up the train or get crushed by the class barriers. Quite the metaphor.
Quite a few interesting happenings occurred to us as we traveled through 1st Class. Initially, we found a train car that was completely exposed, requiring breathing equipment in order to pass through safely. Our early investment in gas masks paid off, but this was not an obstacle I expected to hit, and would have had no answer for if I wasn’t guided by experts. When we got back into a covered car and set up a new base (in a relatively swanky cabin that was pretty large but also had too many doors to feasibly defend for long), we spent far less time shooting at the first people we saw and more time attempting to strike deals with them. There were squads who were already ahead of us making their way into the engine room, and assembling as much resistance as possible against them seemed like a stronger move than attempting to go it alone against a well fortified team with much more of an advantage than us. This is possible, and plausible, because teams who don't steal the train engine’s fuel core can still extract with all of the materials they’ve pilfered and plundered during the run, which can be used to build their own trains.
We didn’t see any of this system during our playthrough, but individual players can hoard materials and resources to upgrade their personal safe havens, and eventually pirate their own Marauder trains. According to Red Rover, players can become conductors of these claimed trains, and invite friends to crew it with them. These raiding clans can pool their resources to add cars and all sorts of upgrades to their marauders, but also will be able to use these battle barges to raid other players Marauders as well as the main Titan Train. This sounds like a hectic, somewhat asymmetrical version of Meet Your Maker’s player dungeons, except the dungeons meet on the rails and everyone inside them fights over scraps of toilet bowl. This is also something very much still in development and farther down the roadmap.
With a team already fortifying themselves inside the engine room, and a shaky alliance made between us and another hodgepodge raiding party, we pooled our efforts to secure entry to the conductor class car, and had ourselves a tense and awkward stakeout. The group we allied with got taken out by other stragglers before fully crossing into the car, and we were on our own again, building what would be our last base in a car full of verdant greenery and opulence. Here, we attempted to goad the enemy out, sometimes literally Flak and Fred barking insults through the door hoping to annoy them to death. We sort of had them in a hard spot - their only way off of this train should they decide to take the fuel core and bounce was through us. We weren’t exactly safe either, though, as straggling raiders were making their way up to the engine room, effectively pinching us between the conductors and them.
The stalemate would eventually break after we were forced to turn our attention to the amassing amount of enemies crowding this final car. The conductors took advantage of the chaos to add a bit more, by pulling the fuel core and starting a meltdown sequence, filling the car with toxic gas and using all of the bedlam to escape past us. The clock starts ticking and everyone has the same primary goal now: get the hell off of the train. Practically, this meant a mad dash back several cars to an escape door and through other players who might be more motivated by spite than survival, shooting at anyone who isn’t them in hopes that we have goodies worth keeping as a consolation prize. It was hard to tell in all the desperate running and gunning who extracted and who didn’t. All I know is that we definitely didn’t, missing the chance to blow the train by mere seconds.
Through our session, I got the most mileage out of the snappy shooting and melee combat and tactical navigation decisions, but there are some systems present that never left the station this time around. A contract was started by a player that asked all of the active raiders to choose a side: either to rise up and overthrow the current conductor, or to fight on the conductor’s behalf. The outcome sorts the lobby into two teams and provides an extra reward if one side wins over the other. I wasn’t entirely sure how either team was supposed to do this? Was there a time limit, or a kill threshold? This is something I'm sure the average player would get the hang of after a few games, but I largely ignored this and didn’t feel like I missed anything. There are also some survival elements to contend with, specifically hunger and thirst. I was constantly picking up things that sounded like terrible meals, like roach nests and weird train grown mushrooms, but I died so regularly that I never had to worry about what a pie made of human ears, a more advanced meal option, might taste like.
There's a lot I didn’t see in my first run of Enginefall, from the alternate pathways players can take making every run to the front of the massive Titan Train unique, to the player-driven or environmental events that incentivize raiders to take higher risks for higher rewards. It can be messy to learn and difficult to know how to proceed at first, and the fast pace of this death race makes it impossible to stop and smell the roses for too long, but the fun shooting and looting really has me interested in getting back on the rails when its first public playtest goes live October 24th-26th.
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