Choo-Choo Charles

Charles has been very bad...

Admittedly, when I saw the trailer for Choo-Choo Charles, I freaked out. I won't say I love trains, but I do have a certain fondness for them. My first real father figure, Ron, used to take me to the Twin City Model Railroad Museum all the time growing up.

But this? This is chaos.

In a nutshell, you are an unnamed archivist who is brought to an island to assist in the takedown of Charles, a half train, half giga-spider monstrosity that wants nothing more to eat you, bones and all.

But hey, you don't have to take Charles on alone. You have your trusty train engine, armed with several different weapons to help you out. And that should be enough to help you survive, right? You'd definitely think so, but if you want to survive out there, you'll need to do some work first.

In your travels around the island, you'll come across several people who will have you do favors for them in exchange for weapons, upgrade parts, and even some new paint colors for your lone engine. Most of these are simple fetch quests, but there's a few that turn up the stakes as you soon run into cultists who worship this demonic train spider.

Charles is going to get you...

While this does make the gameplay slightly repetitive (aided in the fact that you are limited to the set track around the island while in your train), the ever present threat of Charles is constantly looming in the distance, his lonely whistle cutting through the otherwise silent night. You hear that, and you better hope you're near to your train so you can unleash a fire of lead or actual fire into the beast, or you'll very quickly wind up dead.

While you can eventually beat Charles, there is a pretty heavy implication that he'll be back, so what was it all for? Regardless of the answer to that question, I'm definitely intrigued at the possibilities.

Overall, Choo-Choo Charles is a fun little game. It's admittedly short (I beat it in just over 5 hours), but games don't need to be long to be enjoyable. There's some replayability, as there are hidden secrets to find on the island, and you could always try a different weapon setup to beat Charles. The graphics are a bit sketch at times, especially in the lack of any sort of facial animations for the human characters, but as an early access game, that's fine by me.

All in all, I give the game 8 out of 10 stars. I'll probably boot it up again in the future, and if there's a sequel, you can count me in.
 

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