All Aboard! The Train Defense Express

A train that never stops

The premise of All Aboard! The Train Defense Express is unusually specific, and that specificity is its best idea: your locomotive loops an endless, fixed circular track around a central power generator, and instead of placing towers freely the way most defense games work, you buy and slot carriages onto the train itself. Enemies swarm in from every direction; your train's carriages — turrets, in practice — mow them down as it passes. It's tower defense with the placement puzzle replaced by a build-your-loadout puzzle, crossed with the escalating stat-scaling of a survivors-like and the idle-clicker habit of numbers climbing past readable magnitudes. Solo developer Likadev's pitch of "auto-battler meets survivor meets tower defense meets idle/clicker" isn't marketing exaggeration — it's a genuinely accurate description of a hybrid that doesn't have an obvious direct comparison on Steam.

For the first hour or two, by the near-unanimous account of its own review base, that hybrid works. One reviewer opens with buying the game "as a joke thinking this is just a silly little train game," only to report six hours gone, a missed meal, and mild dehydration. Another calls it "an interactive screen saver with a minimal sound track" and means it as a compliment. The loop of watching gold multiply, dropping in a new carriage, and seeing the kill numbers tick upward hits the same reward circuitry idle games are built around, and at NZD 6.99 several reviewers who otherwise soured on it still say it delivered enough for the price of a coffee.

Where the track runs out

The trouble, and it's the single most consistently cited complaint in the negative review sample, is that nothing about a run persists into the next one. The most-upvoted negative review on the store page states it as bluntly as possible: "0 meta, 0 progression between runs. Only 1 mode, endless." Every carriage you unlock, every level you reach, every gold total you accumulate resets the moment a run ends, with no meta-currency, unlock tree, or persistent upgrade layer carrying forward — the exact structure that gives most idle and roguelite hybrids their long-tail hook is simply absent here. Several reviewers describe finishing a three- or four-hour run and having nothing to show for it except the memory of having played it, which for a genre built on the promise of visible permanent growth is a real structural gap, not a matter of taste.

That absence compounds with a second, more specific complaint: the late-game upgrade interface itself degrades into busywork. Multiple reviewers independently describe a stretch where progressing means manually clicking through hundreds of individual loot chests one at a time to buy the next tier of upgrade, with no bulk-purchase option — one reviewer calls it "never ending choosing upgrades, not in a fun way," another flags the lack of a bulk-upgrade toggle as the single biggest missed feature. Layered on top of that are long, unskippable "All In" confirmation animations that several players say exist purely to pad out time between decisions rather than to communicate anything. None of these are subtle bugs; they're friction built into the core interaction loop that shows up the moment a run runs long enough to matter.

Numbers that outgrow the engine

There's also a real, reported performance problem as those numbers scale. The game's core conceit — gold and damage figures that climb into the quadrillions and beyond, per its own achievement list — means the simulation has to keep track of enormous numbers as a run extends, and at least one review reports the game grinding down to roughly 1 frame per second after several hours as a result, with a separate reviewer independently confirming "the number crunching caused by the infinite scaling" brought even a strong PC "to its knees." This isn't universal across the review sample, but it recurs specifically enough, tied to the same specific late-run mechanic, to treat as a real and current technical limitation rather than an isolated hardware complaint.

The achievement data actually tells a more generous story about the game's depth than the "0 meta progression" complaint might suggest in isolation. The completion curve runs smoothly from 97.5% (kill 1,000 enemies) down through survival- and level-based milestones into single digits for the hardest "superboss" fights (as low as 1.7% for the Impossible-difficulty boss) — a genuine, gradual difficulty ladder exists for players willing to push a single run far enough, even without persistent progression between runs. It's a game with real content depth hidden behind a structural choice — no meta-progression — that a meaningful share of its own audience considers close to disqualifying.

Where this leaves it

All Aboard! The Train Defense Express has a genuinely clever hook and, on the evidence of its own reviewers, a first hour or two that earns its asking price on novelty alone. What it doesn't have is a reason to come back a second or third time in the way the genres it's borrowing from usually promise — no meta-progression, a late-run interface that turns into repetitive clicking, and reported performance problems exactly when the game's own scaling systems are working as designed. If the price is right and the expectation is a single memorable afternoon rather than a game with legs, it delivers; expect the "idle" and "clicker" framing on the store page to undersell how much of the early game demands your attention, and expect the fun to taper hard once the numbers get big enough to test the engine.