Hexa Trains

Hexa Trains is a simulation game where players design and manage a railway network on procedurally generated planets. The goal is to lay tracks, schedule trains, and ensure the planet’s economy thrives by connecting industries and cities. The game’s random planet generation adds a layer of unpredictability, requiring strategic planning to overcome challenges like limited resources or isolated cities.

Hexa Trains: A Review of the Ambitious but Flawed Planetary Railway Simulator

Introduction

In the crowded landscape of simulation and strategy games, Hexa Trains stands as a singularly audacious experiment. Released in October 2019 by solo developer Bram Stolk’s Game Studio Abraham Stolk Inc., this title promises a logistical challenge of cosmic proportions: constructing a global railway network on a procedurally generated hexagonal planet, with expansion to its moon. It positions itself as a god-tier infrastructure simulator where players orchestrate supply chains between industries, schedule trains, and nurture planetary economies. Yet, beneath this intriguing premise lies a game grappling with foundational flaws—a testament to the perilous tightrope walk between indie ambition and technical execution. This review dissects Hexa Trains’s legacy, dissecting its mechanics, art, and reception to determine whether it deserves a place in the pantheon of great simulation titles or remains a fascinating footnote.

Development History & Context

Hexa Trains emerged from the mind of Bram Stolk, a veteran indie developer known for titles like The Little Crane That Could. The project began with a Kickstarter campaign in 2019, which tragically failed to secure funding. Undeterred, Stolk persisted, self-funding the game’s development while championing a “Linux-first” philosophy. He built the title atop a custom engine leveraging SDL2 for cross-platform compatibility and OpenGL for rendering—a pragmatic choice that enabled Windows and Linux releases but constrained graphical fidelity. The game arrived on October 7, 2019, during a saturated market dominated by polished giants like Cities: Skylines and Transport Fever. In an era where simulation games prioritized accessibility or depth, Hexa Trains dared to be niche, focusing on a hyper-specific loop: rail-based logistics on a spherical hex-grid. Its genesis reflects the double-edged sword of solo development: unfiltered creative vision paired with limited resources.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

Hexa Trains eschews traditional narrative in favor of emergent storytelling through gameplay. There are no characters or scripted plotlines—only the silent ballet of supply chains and locomotives. The game’s “narrative” unfolds in player-driven milestones: connecting a coal mine to a smelter, routing grain from farms to bakeries, or launching rockets to ferry “mooncrystals” between planetary ports. This abstraction serves a thematic exploration of interconnectedness and scale. Industries form a web of dependency:
– Planetary Flow: Coal mines fuel smelters, which supply warehouses that produce goods for cities. Grain farms feed bakeries, which in turn provide sustenance for spaceports.
– Lunar Flow: Moonbases receive food from planetary spaceports, while lunar quarries send “moonrock” to moonlabs, which refine “mooncrystals” bound for universities.

The economy’s adaptive pacing acts as a core theme—industries throttle production if their storage fills, or halt entirely if inputs pile up. This creates a tense rhythm of demand and supply, where players must balance expansion with efficiency. Yet, the game’s lack of explicit storytelling—a void filled only by generic city names (“City-1,” “City-2”)—undermines emotional resonance. Hexa Trains is a parable of logistics, not people, making its universe feel sterile despite its cosmic scope.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

Hexa Trains’s gameplay revolves around three interlocking loops: track construction, train scheduling, and economic management.

Track Building

• Hexagonal Grid: The planet is tessellated into hexagonal tiles (with occasional pentagons), requiring players to lay directional “uni-rail” pieces. Tracks can only connect along tile edges, with sharp bends prohibited.
• Controls: Shift+dragging between tile edges places segments; arrow keys extend or delete tracks. Trains cannot reverse, demanding players create closed-loop routes.
• Flaws: The system is brittle. Random generation can place industries on isolated tiles, making connections impossible. Water tiles lack bridges or tunnels, forcing convoluted land routes. Critics noted the process feels “point-and-click archaic” compared to 1994’s Transport Tycoon.

Train Scheduling

• Deployment: Players build trains from depots and assign routes via a “click stations” sequence. Trains autonomously follow paths once launched.
• Economic Impact: Successful routes boost industry output. Idle trains or blocked stations cause factories to reduce production.

Economy & Progression

• Scoring: Players are rated on total economic output and factory service coverage.
• Procedural Challenges: Random planets may spawn with only one city or stations rendered inaccessible by terrain. As one review lamented, “Gevatter Zufall [Father Chance] plays tricks… stations can be completely blocked, which is frustrating.”
• Innovations: The moon integration adds verticality, requiring players to manage interplanetary supply chains via rocket launches—a novel twist absent in terrestrial sims.

The UI, however, is a point of contention. Placeholder graphics and minuscule font sizes obscure critical information, while keyboard shortcuts (e.g., cycling stations with “S”) feel unintuitive.

World-Building, Art & Sound

Hexa Trains’s world-building is both its strength and Achilles’ heel. Procedurally generated planets offer near-infinite replayability, with hexagons creating organic, sprawling landscapes. The moon serves as a stark contrast—a barren, cratered expanse demanding specialized logistics. Yet, the art direction is functional at best. Bram Stolk’s minimalist aesthetic uses flat colors and simple shapes, resembling programmer art. Textures are repetitive, and industrial buildings lack distinct identities.

Sound design is similarly utilitarian. Lo-fi chimes and train whistles punctuate gameplay, while ambient tracks from cynicmusic.com evoke a subdued, industrial mood. Audio cues for traffic jams or storage overloads are absent, forcing players to rely on visual indicators like orange icons. The overall atmosphere is one of quiet efficiency, but it never transcends the functional, failing to evoke the wonder of planetary-scale engineering.

Reception & Legacy

Upon release, Hexa Trains received a lukewarm reception. Gamer’s Palace awarded it 54%, criticizing its “frustrating” random generation and lack of clear objectives. Steam users mirrored this sentiment, with 63% positive reviews (based on 11 early reviews) and a “Mixed” overall score. Common complaints included crashes on launch, outdated OpenGL driver issues, and a perceived “unfinished” state.

Critics lauded its ambition but lamented its execution:

“It’s a simple train game… but the train got itself onto a rocket and launched into the air. I realized there were other planets… Procedurally generated. Install size is 75MBs. Developer must be an indie.” — Steam User Review

Commercially, Hexa Trains struggled. Its $16.99 price point and niche focus limited sales, compounded by no major updates post-October 2019. Culturally, it remains a niche curiosity. Influenced by classics like OpenTTD and Railroad Tycoon, it introduced the hex-planet concept but failed to refine it, leaving no discernible legacy on subsequent titles. Its most lasting impact is as a cautionary tale of solo development: a game that dared to innovate but was undone by polish and scope.

Conclusion

Hexa Trains is a fascinating relic of indie ambition—a game that dares to simulate interplanetary logistics on a shoestring budget. Its hexagonal planets and lunar supply chains offer a unique framework for economic puzzle-solving, while its emergent storytelling through industrial chains provides fleeting moments of satisfaction. Yet, these strengths are overshadowed by systemic flaws: unforgiving randomization, a brittle UI, and a lack of post-release support that left it in a perpetual beta state.

For simulation purists, Hexa Trains is a curio worth experiencing for its sheer audacity. For most players, however, its frustrations—crashes, obtuse controls, and sterile visuals—outweigh its novel concepts. Bram Stolk’s vision deserved better execution, but as it stands, Hexa Trains occupies a liminal space: not a classic, not a disaster, but a compelling reminder of the fine line between genius and folly in game development. In the grand chronicle of simulation history, it remains an enigma—a planetary railway half-built, waiting for a conductor who never arrived.