Ammossum: the best idea of the year, on a train that does not always start

Let me start with the thing that made me write this article, because it is brilliant and few people will see it.

In Ammossum, your railcars are your health. And each one gives you a skill.

You can see immediately what that produces. Mid-fight, when things go wrong, you are not looking at a red bar. You are looking at your train and choosing which car to let die. The one that gives you economy, or the one that gives you battlefield control? You are not losing health, you are losing an ability.

That is the sort of idea people will remember, and it is in an eight euro game from a studio nobody has heard of.

The rest of the machine

The world is falling apart, your family has been taken, the infected swarm the railroads, the plague spreads, and the only direction available is forwards. Keep the train moving, search for answers, and face what waits at the end of the line.

The tone is overwrought, the art is genuinely good: sharp, colourful, legible even when the screen fills up.

The other notable idea is the weaponry. You do not pick a gun from a list, you craft your projectiles by nesting them inside each other and fusing them. A projectile can contain another, which triggers on impact, which releases more. At the start you fire bullets, by the end you set off chain reactions that fill the screen.

It is very satisfying when it works. One player sums the curve up well: it starts plain, then the explosions and ricochets pile up and it gets really good.

And then.

Forty-nine positive reviews out of seventy-eight. A mixed reception. And there are three reasons, all serious.

The game does not start for a share of players. Several describe the same sequence: the engine logo appears, then a black screen with only the mouse cursor. No crash, no message, just nothing. And these are not old machines.

There is no arguing with that one. A game that does not launch does not get a score.

The crashes. For those who get past the black screen, the game crashes too often to recommend, and the save system sets you back a long way. The first problem is forgivable, the second makes it worse.

And the death spiral. This is the design complaint, and it comes directly from the good idea at the start.

Since your railcars are both your life and your skills, losing two does not weaken you slightly, it removes two tools. You were barely hanging on with your attack cars, you have just lost them, and now you are meant to claw back with less power than the amount that was already insufficient.

The best mechanic in the game is also the one that makes it impossible to recover. It is fascinating, and it is not solved.

Meta-progression

It is judged too slow to offset the mechanical demand. In other words, the game asks you to get better faster than it hands you the tools to do so.

That tuning changes with two lines of a spreadsheet, and players say so themselves: they are waiting for a balance patch. The studio is described as very present and very responsive, which is the best sign available at this stage.

A word on the calendar

Ammossum came out on 28 September. The next day brought Endless Rails, another wave survival game on a train crossing a devastated world, for under five euros.

Two train games twenty-four hours apart, in the same sub-genre, at comparable prices. If you are torn between them, the difference fits in one sentence: Ammossum has the better idea, Endless Rails runs better.

I would like to love this game more than I do. A railcar that is simultaneously a life and a skill is a design find that deserves to be copied, and nested projectile crafting is a real proposition in a saturated genre.

But you do not review a find, you review what launches on people's machines. Let us come back to this in a month, there is a decent chance it will be a different game.

Have you managed to recover a run after losing two cars? Tell us, because nobody else can on the InsertCoins Discord.