Train Sim World 7 was provided by Dovetail Games for review. Thank You!
Another year has passed, which means it's time for the next iteration in the Train Sim World franchise. That's right, Train Sim World 7 is here, and while things are mostly the same, as we've come to expect from franchises with annual releases, there are a couple of nice extras going on here.
As you might expect, Train Sim World 7 feels more like a game update to Train Sim World 6 instead of a whole new game. The graphics aren't really improved, the gameplay mechanisms are essentially identical, and even the menu looks pretty much the same. The 2 key features Dovetail Games is promoting to push Train Sim World 7 are Freight Hauler mode and the ability to use live weather data for a more authentic experience.
The Freight Hauler mode almost feels like a rather relaxed minigame. Freight cars are spread throughout the map, and it's your job to drive freight trains to collect them and deliver them to their destination; it's essentially the "Free Roam" mode, but with side objectives to keep you focused on a task. I would have loved to have seen additional objectives like these added to the Free Roam mode to make the game a bit more engaging. Finding random tasks along the route, while somewhat unrealistic, would have added to my experience.
The Live Weather feature similarly worked quite well for me. I live near one of the routes featured in the game, so I tried out the feature on 2 separate days, and it produced accurate weather scenarios for both of those occasions. I'm unsure how "dynamic" it is if the weather will change in-game during a route if the real-life weather changes, but at least when you start the route, it seems to be accurate to what the weather is at the time of the route starting.
The game's detail still holds up, and the newly added trains are high quality. If you know the trains in real life, then you'll get a kick out of seeing them in the game. The stations are also fairly well designed, although there are sections here and there which are of questionable quality.
I was actually able to test out a couple of trains I'm familiar with in real-life, such as the Class 66 DB and Class 323 TTC; both are very well recreated in the game, with authentic sounds and designs, and it's great to be able to get up close and see inside the cabin of trains you see all the time on the rails in real life.
One thing I did enjoy was the sound design, although quite repetitive when driving a train at a solid speed for a long period of time. Opening windows does alter the soundscape, and when you enter tunnels and go past large objects, you get a good sense of the audio changing. It's hard to resist blaring your horn as you go through a tunnel.
The train driving in Train Sim World 7 appears completely unchanged from Train Sim World 6. You have your more complex controls, which require you to manually adjust buttons and levers in the cabin, and the simplified scheme, which allows you to use buttons on your controller/keyboard to do certain actions like throttle, braking, horn, and lights. Random faults/failures return to add a bit of excitement, but they are quite rare.
I did encounter a couple of bugs. Once, my throttle was stuck at maximum and didn't respond to what I was doing with the throttle or brake thereafter, resulting in my train crashing and getting stuck going 170KM/H, even after the crash. It's possible this was caused by Frame Generation, though, as I did have input issues when using the technology.
Secondly, a couple of times my train just... inverted. I would be driving along just fine, and then the camera would lurch forward, and my train would become undrivable. Switching the exterior camera revealed that the locomotive was now upside down and halfway in the ground, very strange and somewhat irritating after you've driven for 30 minutes on a mission.
The crash physics themselves also leave much to be desired, with trains pinging off into oblivion when you crash them, much like previous entries in the franchise.
When it comes to Steam Deck performance, Train Sim World 7 performs very similarly to Train Sim World 6, likely because they use the same base game engine. Controls-wise, it's perfectly fine to play the game with a gamepad, thanks to the simplified controller options available.
The game defaults to the High preset, with FSR set to Balanced, but I found the GPU bottlenecked performance a bit, so I recommend you drop to Medium. Frame Generation is on by default, and I recommend disabling it; it caused strange controller issues for me, duplicating inputs when it was enabled.
The game fluctuates a bit between 25-45 FPS, depending on where you are. As the game is fairly slow-paced, locking the game to 30 is acceptable. Just expect frame drops into the 20s near stations due to heavy CPU load.
Do bear in mind that there will be fairly consistent traversal stutter, particularly when travelling at speed as it loads in the assets, but as you tend to make decisions far in advance in Train Sim World, reaction times shouldn't really be too much of a concern for a seasoned player. You can't really do anything to eliminate this stutter, which is down to CPU load.
Power draw is on the higher end, using around 18-21W for most of the play, but that can drop if you're in quiet areas. Expect around 2.5 Hours from a Steam Deck OLED battery, and around 1.5 Hours from a Steam Deck LCD. Temperatures were around the 60-65C mark.
Train Sim World 7 has a "simple control" scheme, which takes a lot of the complexity out of managing the train. Essentially, you'll be controlling the train with your controller's buttons, rather than pressing buttons in the cabin to control everything. It also has other assists to handle some of the more fiddly parts of train driving.
It also has support for subtitles, UI scaling, and colorblind filters.
Train Sim World 7 offers a couple of modest features to entice players of previous games. But ultimately, it will be the upcoming TSW7 exclusive DLC that will be the main draw. The DLC remains as pricey as ever, making it hard to recommend to anyone but hardcore train enthusiasts.
Performance on the Steam Deck is fine. Yes, there are stutters and frame drops here and there, but given the nature of the game, it remains perfectly playable, and you can enjoy your time with it once you get used to the slightly inconsistent performance. The controls are adapted well if you keep things on the simpler settings.
このレビューはPC版に基づいています。
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Train Sim World 7 doesn't offer much over its predecessor to encourage users to move across to it, but the enticement of additional DLC is sure to push over the loyal few. The game runs acceptably, but not great, on the Steam Deck.
