Islands & Trains

About Islands & Trains

Islands & Trains is a single player casual city builder game. It was developed by Akos Makovics and was released on May 29, 2025. It received positive reviews from players.

Build Islands. And Trains. No goals, no timer, no stress. Just build, relax, enjoy.

Genres & Tags

Play Modes

Single-Player

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Reviews

88%Audience ScoreBased on 351 reviews

graphics18 positive mentions

grinding7 negative mentions

Calming and relaxing sandbox experience with a focus on creativity and peaceful train layouts.
Easy to pick up with intuitive tools, offering a wide variety of assets to customize islands and railways.
Charming low-poly art style and pleasant music that create a cozy and nostalgic atmosphere.

Limited gameplay features, including only one train initially and no objectives or challenges, which may reduce long-term engagement.
Control scheme and building mechanics can feel unintuitive or cumbersome, with awkward placement rules and lack of common quality-of-life features like easier deletion or overlap.
Some technical issues such as performance stuttering on large builds, occasional bugs, missing features (e.g., multiple trains, first-person train view), and a somewhat small build area limit the overall experience.

graphics
37 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
49% positive mentions, 43% neutral mentions, 8% negative mentions
The game features a charming low-poly, cartoony art style that creates a warm, cozy, and relaxing atmosphere, complemented by smooth animations and pleasing sound design. Its clean, polished visuals with detailed biomes and customizable elements effectively capture a nostalgic, diorama-like aesthetic. While some find the pastel color scheme challenging for interface readability, overall the graphics are praised for their simplicity, cohesiveness, and strong artistic appeal.
- “Lovely extensive sandbox game with nice visuals, cozy atmosphere, easy to grasp controls/accessibility and wide customization to create the scenery you want.”
- “The world of islands & trains is brought to life through a soft, low-poly art style that perfectly complements its meditative tone.”
- “The visual aesthetics of the game are clean, polished, and of very good quality, portraying a beautiful countryside scenery.”
- “I really want to like this game, but the graphical interface is almost impossible to use due to the pale pastel color scheme they used for this game.”
- “- The building pieces themselves can have plentiful different designs, some changing only graphically while others actually change the size of the block.”
- “[*] Visuals are cute and well-crafted, and are all cohesive.”
music
22 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
59% positive mentions, 27% neutral mentions, 14% negative mentions
The game's music is consistently described as calming, pleasant, and well-integrated with the relaxing gameplay and charming visuals. It creates a soothing atmosphere with gentle ambient sounds and melodic tracks, enhancing the cozy, stress-free experience. Additionally, thoughtful audio options, like the ability to toggle music separately, are appreciated by players.
- “The sound design ties it all together: gentle ambient noises, the soft clatter of wheels on rails, and a calm, melodic soundtrack that helps you lose yourself in the moment.”
- “This game is so cozy and makes me very relaxed, it captures the perfect atmosphere, the art style is super cute and the music calming.”
- “I really appreciate the various themes, the vibe, and calm relaxing soundtrack.”
- “I tend to put my own music on instead.”
- “Played a different relaxing game where you could only turn off all sound with no option for just music, did not like that so this is much better, glad these devs were thoughtful.”
- “- soundtrack”
gameplay
19 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
21% positive mentions, 63% neutral mentions, 16% negative mentions
The gameplay is praised for its relaxing, approachable mechanics and smooth controls, offering a pleasant mix of active and passive play suitable for chill sessions. However, it lacks some quality-of-life features like customizable controls and time-of-day adjustments, which can make longer play sessions feel repetitive and limit depth or challenge for those seeking goals or complexity. Overall, it provides a soothing and straightforward experience but may feel shallow or tedious over extended periods without added variety.
- “It's truly stunning, and super easy to get a hold of the mechanics.”
- “The simplicity of its mechanics makes it approachable for anyone, yet the depth of customization ensures that dedicated builders will find plenty to explore.”
- “The movement and gameplay is so smooth and nice.”
- “I do not really understand why the controls can't be changed to doing hold left click to do large selection to place and hold right click to do large delete selection of the first layer of gameplay objects.”
- “You cannot rebind the destroy mechanic to your right mouse button or any hotkey for that matter, as you must actively select the tool with left mouse button then apply the left mouse button to the area to be destroyed.”
- “I love the vibe and the general gameplay, but my biggest issue at the moment is, I see all these beautiful landscapes in the screenshots and trailer, but it's kinda hard and tedious to do all of that from scratch!”
grinding
8 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
13% positive mentions, -1% neutral mentions, 88% negative mentions
Grinding is effectively non-existent in this game, as players can build with everything immediately without unlocking or waiting. However, building and terraforming can feel tedious and unintuitive, making the creative process more frustrating than relaxing despite the game's cozy vibe and beautiful landscapes.
- “I love the vibe and the general gameplay, but my biggest issue is that it's hard and tedious to create all these beautiful landscapes from scratch.”
- “This is such a beautiful cozy game, but it becomes tedious.”
- “Building terrain is tedious; I have to manually rotate and place every diagonal piece.”
story
6 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
50% positive mentions, 0% neutral mentions, 50% negative mentions
The game features no traditional story or missions, focusing instead on a relaxing, open-ended sandbox experience that encourages creativity and personal engagement. While this minimalist design provides charm and freedom, some players feel the addition of optional missions or challenges could enhance replay value and offer a more structured introduction to gameplay mechanics.
- “Instead of offering missions or challenges, it simply hands you the tools and says, “make something that makes you happy.” That design philosophy is what gives Islands & Trains its unique charm; it’s a game that doesn’t demand your attention but gently earns it through its quiet, creative freedom.”
- “It all has a lot of character and it’s very easy to tell a story - I love the little animal animations in particular.”
- “I also think that adding optional missions would give the game a different kind of engagement compared to its main goal (relaxation), while providing more dynamism and replay value.”
- “I expected there to be mission or scenarios to complete as well as basic research elements to unlock but it literally has nothing.”
- “If you are looking for a story, there is none.”
- “Instead of offering missions or challenges, it simply hands you the tools and says, 'make something that makes you happy.' That design philosophy is what gives Islands & Trains its unique charm; it’s a game that doesn’t demand your attention but gently earns it through its quiet, creative freedom.”
atmosphere
6 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
50% positive mentions, 50% neutral mentions, 0% negative mentions
The game's atmosphere is widely praised for its cozy, relaxing, and soothing qualities, enhanced by charming visuals, calming music, and accessible controls. It creates a nostalgic, restorative environment that encourages mindfulness and digital escape. Overall, the harmonious blend of art style and sound fosters a pleasant, immersive experience.
- “Lovely, extensive sandbox game with nice visuals, cozy atmosphere, easy-to-grasp controls/accessibility, and wide customization to create the scenery you want.”
- “I find it very relaxing and soothing as the art style and music create a pleasant atmosphere.”
- “The sound is simple but relaxing; it fits the game and harmonizes with the game's picturesque atmosphere.”
optimization
5 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
0% positive mentions, 40% neutral mentions, 60% negative mentions
The game suffers from noticeable performance issues, especially with larger canvases or many assets, causing stuttering and instability. Users highlight the need for better optimization, autosave, and improved stability to enhance the overall experience. Expanding the build area is desired but currently limited by performance constraints.
- “Strong idea with a lot of potential, but stability, autosave, and performance optimizations are badly needed to fully enjoy the experience.”
- “The performance is poor; when I zoom out a bit, there are massive stutters, which is ridiculous for a game this small.”
- “Only complaint is slight stuttering when you zoom out fully and have too many assets in one save.”
stability
5 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
0% positive mentions, 0% neutral mentions, 100% negative mentions
The game suffers from numerous bugs and stability issues, including slow and unresponsive controls, unreliable menu interactions, and glitchy achievements, making it less stable and more frustrating compared to similar titles. However, the bugs are generally not considered severe.
- “The controls are buggy and poor; zooming with the mouse wheel is super slow, panning around is super slow, and even something as simple as clicking on a menu item doesn't always work.”
- “Islands & trains is much more user friendly than, for example, tracks, which I also have but found it difficult and fairly buggy.”
- “Very buggy and the opposite of relaxing; can't be compared to other games.”
replayability
2 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100% positive mentions, 0% neutral mentions, 0% negative mentions
The game offers high replayability, especially for those who enjoy cozy, creative gameplay, with potential for even more engagement through optional missions that add variety beyond its relaxing main goal.
- “I also think that adding optional missions would give the game a different kind of engagement compared to its main goal (relaxation), while providing more dynamism and replay value.”
- “If you enjoy cozy, creative tools, this could easily offer unlimited replayability.”
emotional
2 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100% positive mentions, 0% neutral mentions, 0% negative mentions
The game delivers a cute, wholesome, and heartfelt emotional experience, enhanced by a fitting art style and pleasant music. While its relaxing gameplay contributes to its charm, the lack of certain quality-of-life features slightly diminishes its overall zen feel and long-term appeal.
- “This game is wonderfully heartfelt and beautifully crafted.”
- “It is cute and wholesome, with a fitting graphical style, pleasant music, and mostly relaxing gameplay, but it misses some highly desired quality of life (QoL) features that hold it back from being quite as zen as it should have been, and robbed it of any sense of longevity too.”