Endless Rails: eight hours of fun for five euros, and that is perfectly fine

There is an honesty to Endless Rails I would like to see more often.

The game costs 4.89 euros. The players who like it write that it offers eight to twelve hours before you have wrung it dry. And instead of making me want to scold it, that makes me want to congratulate it, because it never claimed otherwise.

The real find is splitting your hands

Here is what separates this from the mass of wave survivors.

Your train moves on the mouse, in two directions. Your drones move on the keyboard, separately. And the drones fire by themselves.

That means you are piloting two things at once, on two devices, doing different jobs. The train absorbs and advances, the drones go and collect coins, attack, and use abilities like dash or push.

It is simple to describe and surprisingly occupying to play. In a genre where you often just move a character while the game shoots, splitting the two functions creates genuine mental load.

The structure is well judged: rides between stations last twenty to thirty seconds. That is very short, it is deliberate, and it gives the game the rhythm of an arcade machine rather than a marathon.

Building your train

At every station you spend your coins on new cars, weapons, drone slots and buffs.

Two actions matter. You can reorder cars, and above all you can merge them to make them stronger and unlock more module slots.

Merging is the interesting decision in the loop: keep two mediocre cars covering two needs, or make one better car covering one. At every station, you pay that question again.

Between runs, a permanent upgrade tree means each attempt starts a little higher.

The objective the game hands you is clear and well calibrated: reaching station 20 already counts as playing well. And there are rails after that.

What keeps it from climbing higher

The upgrade tree is thin. Several players tell the same story: five runs are enough to max out the first train, and then it is a matter of respeccing towards another type with a handful of choices. In a roguelite, meta-progression is what holds across the long run, and this one exhausts itself before the content does.

Chance decides a lot. Some runs hand you good equipment, others hand you nothing even with a reroll, and you die at wave five or six without having had a say.

And the weapon balance is lopsided. Rifles dominate once you unlock the matching train and their upgrades, while lightning, flamethrower and freeze lag behind. The result is that after a few hours you rebuild the same thing because it is the right thing.

Finally, an ergonomic detail comes up often and it is funny: the drones are not mouse-controlled. Since the train monopolises it, there is no room, and several players cannot get past it mentally.

The neighbour

Impossible to discuss this game without noting that Ammossum shipped the day before: another wave survivor on a train, in a ravaged world, for under nine euros.

They do not play the same. Ammossum has the stronger design idea, since its railcars are both health and skills, but it is held back by launch problems and a difficulty that does not forgive. Endless Rails has no idea that striking, and it runs.

If you are only taking one, take the one that matches your tolerance for rough edges.

Three quarters of reviews are positive, a hundred or so players online at once: a small stable community, much like the game.

What I appreciated, fundamentally, is the sense of proportion. A game of thirty seconds a ride, at five euros, that names station 20 as the goal and does not promise to fill your winter. There are worse contracts.

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