My First TRAINZ Set (Tegra)

Leaping a tiny steam train over a coffee cup was undoubtedly the greatest pleasure this reviewer had with My First TRAINZ Set.

It’s such a shame, then, that putting together the track was fiddlier than building a rollercoaster with matches while wearing oven mitts.

N3V Games’s title makes bold claims about kids working “feverishly together” to build dream virtual railways, but the tools it provides for the task are clumsy, unintuitive, and poorly explained.

To be honest, you’d understand if they binned your Android device and demanded a Hornby set for Christmas instead.

Ostensibly, My First TRAINZ Set is a child-friendly spin on the publisher’s deadly serious (and, generally, deadly dull) Trainz Simulator.

Exclusive to Nvidia Tegra-2 powered handsets and tablets, the game has an innate appeal to anyone who set up a model railway in their bedroom and then used it to run over their sister’s Barbie.

Instead of vast countryside to explore and complex signalling to master, this simpler sim gives you four domestic locations to rattle around: Bedroom, Lounge, Garage, and Kitchen.

In Drive mode, you can simply hop aboard one of the nine realistic train models (from puffing old steam engines to the sleek TGV) and head off along the pre-designed tracks.

The touchscreen controls for going forward, stopping, and reversing are bold and easy to figure out, as is the pair of selectable camera views (first-person cab interior and a pinch-to-zoom exterior cam).

Mild stuttering and texture pop-in aside, the tracks wind smoothly in and around familiar furniture, with some steep hills up to table tops and dizzying drops to the carpet. They're pretty lifelike, too, thanks to lots of incidental details such as strewn magazines, flashing televisions, and a whizzing Scalextric track.

It’s the gameplay itself where My First TRAINZ Set disappoints. Standard driving is livened up by collecting and dropping off household items to specific locations, such as fruit for a smoothie and parts for a robot, but none of it is especially difficult or rewarding.

Collecting coins along the track also nets you points towards an overall star rating, but we managed to bag Gold just for driving without stopping – so the challenge is minimal at best.

The real appeal should come from the ability to craft and design your own elaborate railways, but this is where the game really comes off its tracks.

Apart from a brief text introduction to the icons in Build mode, the lack of a hands-on tutorial means you’ll have to spend a lot of time tinkering about and generally making a ham-fisted job of construction. Moving furniture is easy enough, but the railways themselves are a pain to modify, and the lack of sound effects or any accompanying music soon saps your enthusiasm.

There’s no apparent way to start a track from scratch, so instead you’re left to tweak the pre-designed ones. Even the slightest adjustment, like raising sections of track to create hills, feels clumsy, and having to constantly hold the camera icon to look around doesn’t help.

The idea of an accessible model railway builder is an appealing one, but My First TRAINZ Set’s counter-intuitive design makes it a chore rather than a joy.

Essentially, the hobbled design of N3V Games’s toolkit means only the most patient players will ever build something that doesn’t end with a train hurtling off the tracks into a television.