Trainz Railroad Simulator 2022

Trainz has been running as a franchise since the early 2000s, and this 2022 entry continues its core pitch largely unchanged: drive trains along real or fantastical routes, build your own layouts in Surveyor mode, and draw on an enormous, decades-deep library of community-made content covering everything from meticulously recreated real-world railways to a "random person's Thomas the Tank Engine OC downloaded from a sketchy site," as one reviewer memorably puts it. N3V Games released this version in May 2022, and its roughly 1,255 reviews since have settled at a Mostly Positive 75% — a score that, on close inspection, reflects genuine long-term community devotion running headlong into real, persistent technical and business-model problems.

A community library few simulators can match

The clearest, most consistent praise concerns scale and creativity of user content. Reviewers describe downloading and driving routes recreating specific real-world railways alongside deliberately silly fan creations, and several explicitly frame this as the reason they keep buying successive Trainz versions across years or even decades of the franchise's life. That kind of sustained, self-perpetuating community content library is genuinely hard to build, and it's the clearest, most defensible reason this specific entry — jank and all — still draws real loyalty from its existing audience.

Worse performance than the version it replaced

The single most consistent, most damaging complaint is performance, and reviewers are unusually specific that this entry is a downgrade rather than an improvement over its own predecessor. One detailed review states plainly that despite exceeding the stated requirements on a capable system, framerates struggle to hold 40fps, and multiple other reviewers independently report the same pattern regardless of hardware. That's a serious problem for a simulation game whose whole appeal depends on smoothly watching long, detailed routes unfold — and it's not a new-entry teething issue, since reviewers compare it directly and unfavourably to Trainz 2019 running better on the same or weaker machines.

A recent update that made things worse for some players

This review pulled N3V Games' public Steam patch history directly, and it shows a genuinely long, real support record: service packs shipped in October 2022, November 2023, July 2024, January 2025, August 2025, and July 2026 — nearly four and a half years of continued, substantive attention, which is itself a rare and creditable thing for a game this specialised. But at least one recent reviewer reports that the most recent service pack, SP7, caused a severe regression on their system, dropping from 40-50fps down to roughly 4fps, and asks pointedly what the developers were thinking. That's a specific, serious concern: a long support record is only as good as the patches it actually ships, and a recent one reportedly made performance dramatically worse for at least this player.

Basic visual quality, sold separately

This review independently confirmed via Steam's own DLC listings that 316 separate paid add-ons exist for this base game, spanning routes, locomotives and other content packs. Several reviewers single out one specific example as particularly frustrating: HD terrain textures, something many players would consider a basic visual-quality expectation in 2022 and beyond, are sold as a separate purchase rather than included in the base game. One reviewer sums up the broader sentiment plainly, saying the game is meaningfully better than its predecessors "by a long shot" but still expressing frustration that "everything is DLC locked" — a real, specific tension between genuine improvement and an aggressive monetisation structure layered on top of it.

A learning curve, and a rival worse off

To the game's credit, reviewers who've also used competing train simulators, particularly Dovetail Games' Train Simulator franchise, describe Trainz as the gentler, more approachable option of the two, even while acknowledging its own learning curve is real and its interface unintuitive for newcomers. That's a useful, comparative data point for anyone deciding between the genre's major franchises rather than an unqualified endorsement of Trainz's own usability.

A platform quirk worth flagging separately

This review also found a specific, reproducible complaint from Linux players running the game through Proton: content downloads reportedly fail to refresh properly in the in-game downloader window, and overall performance under Proton is described as considerably worse than the Windows version, even after trying multiple compatibility layer versions. That's a narrower issue than the broader cross-platform performance complaints above, but a specific one worth flagging directly for anyone considering the game specifically on Linux, since the workarounds reviewers describe trying didn't resolve it.

A franchise that keeps extending itself

It's worth noting that N3V Games' attention to the Trainz format didn't stop at service packs for this specific release. This review's check of the developer's public event history found a new, related release, "Trainz Sim: World Tour," launching in July 2026 — the same month as this game's most recent service pack — showing the studio is still actively expanding the format rather than treating this 2022 entry as its final word on the franchise. That's a meaningfully different picture from many of this lane's other yearly-cycle games, where support for a specific edition stops once a successor ships; here, the base 2022 release kept receiving its own updates even as the newer, related product launched alongside it.

Where it lands

Trainz Railroad Simulator 2022 succeeds at sustaining what's genuinely one of gaming's most enduring simulation communities, backed by a real, multi-year support record from its developer. But performance that's specifically worse than its own predecessor, a recent update that reportedly made things dramatically worse for at least one player, and a DLC structure that locks even basic visual quality behind hundreds of separate purchases are serious, well-documented costs. A 5.5 credits a franchise with real, earned community loyalty while taking seriously that this particular entry asks a lot of patience and money in return.