Rail Simulator [PC]

It was not without a certain amount of trepidation that we fired up Rail Simulator. Our combined train experience amounts to a year or two's commuting and a trip up the side of a chilly West Virginia mountain aboard a steam-powered logging train. Being a train driver doesn't exactly sound, at first blush, like the sort of fantasy your typical video gamer might entertain.

So let's get this out of the way first: Rail Simulator is not your typical video game. There are no aliens to shoot, no hot babes to ogle, and no gritty post-apocalyptic cities to explore. There aren't even any gory train crashes or derailments. What Rail Sim does have in abundance, however, is trains, miles and miles of realistically-modeled tracks and stations -- and that's about it.

This, in retrospect, shouldn't have come as much of a surprise. But it's impressive quite how pure and dedicated Rail Sim is to its chosen vocation. The on-screen information readouts are sparse almost to a fault, the graphical special effects like light sources, sparks, smoke and weather are realistically understated, and the game makes no apologies (or concessions) to its slow pace. If you wanted excitement, you should have bought Unreal Tournament 3.

Nevertheless, Rail Sim's strong selection of preset routes offers plenty of variety in challenge level, scenery and theme. You'll haul high-speed commuter trains from London's Paddington station out into the 'burbs as afternoon wends its way into evening. You'll take the helm of hefty diesel locomotives as you run equally hefty quantities of freight over California's Cajon Pass. Perhaps you'll be tasked with giving a train full of sleeping passengers a smooth ride through the Ruhr Valley in Germany. Once completed, there's little in the way of progress other than the satisfaction of a job well done, and a statistical readout of your overall performance.

Rail Sim's rolling stock is appealingly detailed. You can look around the train's cabs to your heart's content, and many levers and buttons can be fiddled with mercilessly. The presentation is quite matter-of-fact - or it is until you consider that there's somewhere in the region of a thousand miles of terrain to see, and none of it is really repetitive. If the greatest test of a simulator is how well it captures the essence of its inspiration, Rail Sim hits the mark. Time after time, we found ourselves relaxing back in our seats, tapping the "blow horn" button, and letting a half-remembered Robert Louis Stevenson poem drift through our heads: "And here is a mill, and there is a river: Each a glimpse and gone forever."

Mind you, in Rail Sim's case, that's not entirely true. The game comes complete with a powerful editor that lets you modify any existing track or create your own from scratch, with a powerful point-and-click interface that sure beats the hell out of Sid Meier's Railroads. You can access it mid-route, too, letting you indulge those "you know, that field over there really needs a herd of cows" fantasies. A glance through the game's data files indicates there's a strong possibility the community will come up with modifications and expansions for the game, so with any luck imaginative rail buffs will already be at work with the toolkit.

Unless you're considerably more experienced in the ways of railways than we were, you might be surprised to hear that driving a steam engine requires a fair bit of skill. You're constantly tweaking throttle, brakes or "reverser" -- a device that performs a similar function to the gears on a car -- to maintain your chosen speed. That's no mean feat when there are four or five interdependent factors you have to juggle in the process -- and that's just on the "intermediate" control setting. It's not unlike driving a 500,000 lb iron bicycle along a high wire.

More modern engines offer a more hands-off experience, but they still have their quirks. Although Rail Sim sets few explicit expectations of its players, there's a real sense of accomplishment when you manage to stop your train precisely at its station, a task that's not as simple as it might sound.

And, we should add, one that's not made much easier by the game's documentation. Although it's fleshed out by some informative PDF files installed with the game, you'll probably need to resort to some trial and error at times, and that's frustrating when a little slip with a set of points instantly leads to a derailment.

Like most pure-bred simulations, Rail Sim offers rewards proportional to the amount of effort you're prepared to invest. If you're rolling your eyes and wondering why anybody would enjoy a "game" like this, you've missed the point. No, it's not an exciting game, nor one that's imbued with a tremendous amount of personality, but there's a unique - and, to be honest, surprising -- joy to taking one of these vast machines rolling past the sights of Northern Europe, perfectly on schedule. Rail Simulator exceeded all our expectations, and the next time we venture up that bone-shaking Appalachian logging run, we'll have a little more respect for the wizened, blue-hatted man at the controls.