Locomoto allows you to create an animal character, who naughtily ‘borrows’ an abandoned train in a bid to help the local villages and towns with the various issues that raise their cheeky heads, thus begins our adventures in the world of Locomoto.
From the website:
"Customise and manage your train, tend to quirky passengers, gather resources, craft decorations, and upgrade your conductors style all accompanied by soft lo-fi tunes. Become a conductor and save your hometown Barrenpyre from environmental disaster!"
Straight off the bat, I was hips deep in this one. The lo-fi, chill-hop soundtrack is absolutely glorious and very clearly yearns for a release on vinyl, the hypnotic, gentle beats completely capture the pastel-coloured, 3D world of the game and its soft characters. There are two main aspects to Locomoto - upgrading and customising your train, and driving said train between towns, picking up and dropping off passengers, making them refreshments, and wandering around the locations assisting the citizens with various parcel deliveries, item requirements, and – more importantly – saving your ailing home town of Barrenpyre!
The whole game is tightly designed and you quickly feel part of this quite expansive community. There’s no voice acting, but the writing shines in delivering dialogue in a way that brings the characters to life, without being overly verbose keeping the pace of the game running along nicely. The in-game maps and train stations are also surprisingly plentiful, meaning that this doesn’t feel restrictive in terms of exploration, and tooting your way from town to town solving quests and stocking up on wood, metals and fabrics to craft new items for your train is a very compulsive cycle, and the visuals are so easy on the eye - combined with the awesome soundtrack that I can’t stop harping on about - that I found the whole experience relaxing and engaging, there are so many little ways you can casually spend your time that nothing feels obstructive or repetitive, just...calming and purposeful.
As much as I love Locomoto, there were some issues discovered during my time with the game. I was advised upon receiving my press copy that there was a known issue – to be solved by a day one patch – whereby the Switch version would routinely crash after around an hour of play, although I found that it crashed far more often in my experience with Locomoto. In one instance, it crashed after I’d spent quite some time in the quaintly named Marigold Market completing various quests, resulting in me spending fifteen minutes or so rushing through them again. The loading times between areas are also quite lengthy with little to look at other than a small animation of a train accompanied by a mostly black screen – not ideal. As stated, the crashes are due to be fixed by the time you read this, but I have to review the version I received. You’ll never lose an hour of work, due to the briskness of the tasks and the regular auto-saves, but it was an issue for me due to the relatively constant crashing, seemingly every 20-30 minutes.
Another problem isn’t to do so much with the hard work of developers Green Tile Digital, but more to do with the ageing hardware the game runs on, it’s mostly 30 fps but there is a sense of choppiness in some areas that detracts from the smoothness of the experience and just shows the age of the console, I’m almost certain that if I covered this on Switch 2 or PC, then the game would be buttery smooth, but again – this is something to take into account.
Locomoto is one of the best games I’ve played in the cosy genre, and I was surprised at how involved I got, you always feel like you are making progress toward a fun goal as opposed to pottering around, passing time – and the whole premise of being a train driver, conductor, waiter, private eye, cleaner, postal worker, and all-round problem solver is as appealing as it sounds, making the moment-to-moment gameplay pure charm.
This is one that will be installed on our family Switch for a long time to come!
8/10
❄️COOL🍨
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