Enginefall is as much about fabricating bandages and building hovels as it is about mad locomotive sci-fi, but upon being invited to try out an early build, its concept proved compelling enough to punch through my survival crafting fatigue like a runaway… I dunno, bus. Basically it’s a first-person Snowpiecer-em up, where a typical session sees postapocalypse survivors raiding enormous trains, fighting (or joining forces) from tail to tip to usurp the conductor’s position and steal precious fuel cores before escaping back to their own private engine.
Again, I like the idea. I especially like that Enginefall isn’t massively fussed how you deal with other Tailies – alliances, truces, and armed banditry are all permitted and accommodated for. What I played last week, sadly, was awkward, janky, and undercooked, to the point where the one thing more ambitious than the game’s railriding concept might be its Q1 2026 release plan.
I specifically joined a Titan train mission. Raids against smaller, player-owned Marauder trains will be possible, but are intended as more of a late-game endeavour. The megavehicle itself was a nice piece of linear action-arena work. Your path to the conductor’s office means advancing through the three main passenger classes, making for distinct progression from third class’ filthy on-rails slums to the opulent art-deco lounges and leafy pleasure gardens of first class.
While each class is gated by keycard-locked doors, the intervening carriages are wide and tall enough to provide a choice of routes through. You could, for example, try sneaking through a lower-level maintenance sector, if you don’t fancy a firefight in the busier passenger quarters – though the Shinkansen this ain’t, and poisonous emissions mean you’ll need to spend some time scavving for parts, building a base, and crafting a gas mask if you want to take the quiet approach.
Hence, survival crafting. It’s cute how the upper tiers of your tech tree unlock as you push through each carriage class, letting you ditch your shitty plastic pistols for the upper crust’s assault rifles. Even so, this aspect of Enginefall comes across as pretty thin, or at worst, actively boring. Gathering resources either takes an age, as it does when sledgehammering plastic out of the train’s chairs, or is trivially easy, like when a new room opens to reveal piles of metal and chemicals strewn across the floor.
Base building doesn’t have much architectural meat to it, either. I can appreciate the novelty of these strongholds being transient – where a Rust or Minecraft base is supposed to be treasured and protected at all costs, Enginefall forces you to ditch and rebuild every time you reach a new class. The catch of this purely utilitarian mindset, though, is that every base my team built was ugly, structurally bland, and only ever big enough to hold some crafting benches and bedrolls for respawn points. It’s something you’d do because you need to, not because you’d want to.
The lack of more engaging or adventurous resource-gathering also quickly made it clear that the best way to get geared is to just shoot people and take their stuff. A truth which, as it has in many survival games before it, could undermine the potential for more interesting interactions, like silent stand-offs or uneasy team-ups.
That said, I did get to enjoy a couple of these moments during my raid. On a scavenging run for the materials we’d need to craft a first class ticket, we were startled by a lone survivor who’d followed us down to the train’s well-hidden furnace area. She had the drop on us but, seeing she was outnumbered, offered us her own ticket in exchange for us leaving peacefully. A deal we gladly accepted, only realising later that we’d essentially mugged someone by accident. Later, in need of more strength to breach the conductor’s locked-down headquarters, we approached, quietly surrounded, and “recruited” another straggler into our ranks. That one was on purpose.
Still, given how much quicker and easier it is to gather loot through murder, I worry that Enginefall’s social facet could suffer the same fate as DayZ’s: tense, unpredictable, highly anecdote-able encounters giving way to bland kill-on-sight deathmatching. The spirit of cooperation (or, at the very least, coexisting) showing through in a game full of devs and journos is one thing, but will it survive in a mic-less pub game environment? I’m not sure.
Either way, Enginefall might have an even bigger problem: it just doesn’t feel that good. The gunplay lacks drama, even with the upgraded weapons in the posh section. Base building, in the confines of siderooms and storage cupboards, is fiddly. Performance is sluggish and choppy, even on my RTX 3090 running at an upscaled 1440p, though that naturally might not be the case at release.
Considering it’s the game’s main hook, I would have also liked a much stronger sense of actually being on a train. The Snowpiercer film was shot by building train carriage sets on top of gyroscopic gimbals, to authentically recreate the effects of high speed rail travel on Chris Evans. Enginefall, however, barely manages a rumbly sound effect. You wouldn’t even know you were on a train throughout most of third and second class, unless you caught a glimpse of the wrecked Earth whizzing by through one of their tiny windows.
I still think there’s a respectable action-survival game in here. Putting the improvised tooling-up and anarchic, sandboxy player interaction of an endless PvP sim into a raid structure – one with a clear beginning, middle, and end – remains an intriguing idea, and the setting is unique among games, if not technically original. But navigating Enginefall’s most central systems just isn’t that fun right now, and retooling them with less than half a year to go would be a big ask. Maybe not Titan big. But Flying Scotsman big, for sure.