I’ll be honest, if you asked me to run down a list of good settings for a survival/crafting extraction shooter, ‘train’ would not feature highly. By their nature, trains are long, cramped, and narrow, and the only material you’re likely to come across is that one weird tissue that some former passenger has left wedged between the chair and the food tray that you will work miracles not to touch. I’ve been on multiple trains in the past year and I’ve only rarely had to open fire on anyone.
So I was sceptical leading up to my hands-on time with Red Rover Interactive’s Enginefall, which is in essence a Dune: Awakening-ish take on Snowpiercer. I might still be a little sceptical, but I see the vision now. Romping about the game’s carriages with ad-hoc armaments, getting the drop on other players, and seeing the ruined world zip by out the window: it works better than it maybe should, and provides ample space for you and other players to gin up temporary, make-do alliances that you betray the nanosecond it becomes profitable.
Good stuff, but there are caveats. First up, I was playing Enginefall under pretty much ideal conditions: alongside devs and media types all compelled to use the game’s in-built voice chat and all starting effectively from scratch. How does that experience translate to regular gameplay, when everyone’s just on a Discord server with their pals and the game’s public comms resound with icy silence? And even if the experience does hold up, will Red Rover manage to get a grip on the game’s technical issues ahead of its planned Q1 2026 release window?
Choo choo
Enginefall—at least the mode I played, taking on one of its humungous titan-class engines—is fundamentally about working your way from one end of the train to the other. You, and perhaps some pals, start out in the doldrums of third class. It sucks there. Things are falling apart, there’s trash everywhere, and how far you can progress on the tech tree, the game’s ladder of guns, explosives, and base features, is limited by the class you’re in.
The goal here is chaos: a constantly shifting terrain of jury-rigged alliances that form and break at the drop of a hat. Perhaps you and your team stumble across another group of players. You could open fire, sure, but that’s risky. Maybe instead you open a dialogue, yell ‘friendly’ and try to work out an arrangement to your mutual benefit. Perhaps the other group has half the materials to craft a second-class ticket and you have the other half. Perhaps they know where other players, fat with resources, are located, and you have the firepower to help knock them over.
Which, in my best-case-scenario play session, is mostly how it worked. For instance, our team’s encounter with a resource-rich and isolated player in one of the game’s cargo bays. We could have killed her, sure, but why make enemies when you can politely mug someone for the one thing they have that you desperately need? Likewise, after achieving some measure of detente with another player in a particularly plentiful area, one of our own team—a dev—immediately crouch-walked over to him to begin pickpocketing his hard-earned lucre. That’s to say nothing of the fellow we encircled, weapons drawn, and more or less press-ganged onto our team by the game’s end.
Whether these kinds of organic and fragile alliances survive into the proper game, when people are playing with people and not game journalists (not people) and developers (the jury’s out) will, I think, make or break Enginefall.
I could easily see the average post-release game descending into the same kind of situation that our game did for the first, oh, 20 minutes or so. Every team had, once unleashed into third class, immediately found some defensible corner to erect a base in. We were no different, finding a relatively out-of-the-way cabin to fortify with doors and fill with whatever crafting stations our pitiful third-class technology could muster.
Then we… stayed there. For quite a while, too. Why? Because poking your head out from the safety of your door—through which enemy players can’t move without smashing it down, which is pretty tough—was a recipe for getting blown the hell away.
There was something WW1 about it: die, respawn at your cot, tool up, and head over the top in hopes that someone you kill might be carrying something worth killing for. It’s entirely possible this is all in-keeping with Red Rover’s vision: at the game’s start you don’t have much worth protecting, so why not repeatedly bet it all by shooting everyone you see? It’s only in later carriages and classes that your personal wealth might incline you to seek more negotiated settlements with other players.
There was something WW1 about it: die, respawn at your cot, tool up, and head over the top in hopes that someone you kill might be carrying something worth killing for
But the problem is it feels a bit aimless, and indeed it was until one of our squad had the good fortune to cap someone who happened to be carrying a second-class ticket. Plus, the shooting doesn’t feel great. It’s a little light, floaty, and lacking in feedback in a way that reminds me, appropriately enough, of the early days of DayZ. I often wasn’t quite sure if I was hitting someone until they flopped over dead, and pulling out your sledgehammer to thwack someone over the head entails a Wile E Coyote-esque pause between making contact and anything actually happening to your foe.
I’m sure that last one, at least, is a bug. We ran into a few during our play session, from plain-jane stutters and hitching on my 4080-equipped machine to some very frustrating teleporting that would see me whisked from one part of the map to the other as the server caught up with itself. At one point, this jaunted me from one of the game’s safe zones into a toxic-gas-filled resource-gathering hub the second the doors locked, dooming me (and my gear) to an early grave. As one final kick to the shins, it also teleported me about 50 feet from my team in the final few seconds of the game, killing me once again and preventing our extraction.
So it’s a little ramshackle at present! Still, for as much as I’ve discussed some of the negatives I encountered in my time with Enginefall here, I do think it has potential. The chaotic social simulation Red Rover is going for is genuinely fun when it all comes together, I just hope it actually does when we’re all playing with randos and not devs. And, yeah, I hope the game stops teleporting me when the game hits at the start of next year, or even by the game’s upcoming public playtest on October 24-26.
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