ZUSI 3 Aerosoft Edition v3.4.6.0-P2P

let me mitigate your comment a little:

“Forget Dovetail games. If its a simulator you want and not a game, this is for you!

Train Simulator and TSW are like watching nice scenery on the TV. You don’t have to concentrate much, as it almost impossible to drive without using the HUD display which makes it all too easy.

Zusi is in another league. You have to concentrate and follow all the rules of German signalling rigorously. It is great fun once you get the hang of it.

Also, the physics of the train driving are much closer to reality (although you will never get to reality without a motion sim, especially when braking).

The other great bonus is that everything is included in the original purchase price, and all updates come for free (yes, all new routes, vehicles, all free). Having invested thousands in TrainSimulator and TSW, it is such a relief to know that I can fire up the program and it won’t cost me a penny!

To sum up, this is the best train SIMULATOR on the market!”

And also:

“Don’t mistake my low hours in this game as inexperience in it by any measure of the imagination. I’ve played this game for nearing about 100 hours. Or, well, “game.” This isn’t really a game per se. There’s no real score. The environments look like flat-pack boxes carved out of the ruins of Microsoft Train Simulator. There’s no shadows, for God’s sakes.

But, in the words of David Gilmour, ♥♥♥♥ all that, we’ve gotta get on with this: this, and I mean this most sincerely, with several thousand hours across a handful of different train simulators, is probably the single most realistic train simulation game ever developed for home use. Nope, that’s not hyperbole. This is not just a simulation of a train, or even a railway. This is a reactive, procedural, real-time simulation of an entire railway network with every single thing you could possibly put your mind to being simulated included. Ever wanted to do train data entry on a BR 142? Now you can, in the fullest fidelity of anything rail related I’ve ever seen. Do you feel like testing your brakes, changing your overhead catenary configuration and voltage settings, or even blowing your battery like an absolute tosser because you pulled the unmarked switch on the control ? Now you can!

Oh, but wot’s that skippy, you’d rather fancy something less digital and more historic? Well, lucky for you, ZuSi comes packaged with an asburdly, incredibly, psychotically detailed simulation of both East and West German railway operations as far back as the late 1950’s. In fact, it does it all. Do you wanna run an ICE at a speed approximating the clappers and throw your keyboard out the window because you missed the LZB to PZB switchover acknowledgement and had the emergency brakes slammed on you? Now you can! Do you enjoy low intensity regional runs over the lovely (blocky, ugly, shadowless, but oh-so-beautifully-simulated) Wutachtalbahn? Absolutely! Just please show me how you open the doors, my crops are dying.

Do be warned, I speak German.

No, not as in “Run away from her, she speaks German, how dare she,” but in a way where this game was made for the German market. As such, if you can read all of the above – aber kannst dies hier nicht lesen – you should probably on this unless you’re really quite okay with using Google Translate like your life depends on it. The English UI is very, very poor, and a lot of the systems you’ll be using, especially historical ones, have either brief descriptions in the manual or no descriptions, forcing you to go onto google searches which are hours long to find this info in German, let alone in English.”

(to be continued in the next comment)

… “The learning curve is insane. It’s Dwarf Fortress combined with learning the MiG-21 in DCS with no manual and the Russian cockpit only insane. It’s madness. It is absolute lunacy, and I can safely say that eevry second driving this has made me feel like some combination of an exceedingly perm’d up German woman in the 1980’s and a train-themed Rambo. The keybind menu looks like a piano for the clinically deranged.

Is it worth 59.95? I think it’s worth double that. You could *live* in this simulator. You could genuinely come home from work and run a second job in the virtual world ferrying 2D cardboard cutouts around flat-pack countryside in three types of weather: bright fog, dark fog, night.

In closing, if you like trains, and speak German, why are you reading this still? Buy it. If you don’t speak German, ehhhhhh, maybe hold off on it? Maybe? It’s a bit pricy for a product which is so awfully ed in English.”

Courtesy of Steam reviewers.

NB: I don’t play train simulators but always got curious about them.