It’s been about a month since Rush Hour released, and you know how we are – As soon as one major update releases, we get to work on the next as soon as possible.

As you probably noticed, we’ve got a story mode planned for the near future as a (free) standalone game – While a lot of our efforts have been diverted to making this experience a reality on time, we’re not going to neglect the main game. After all, improvements for Rail Route are also improvements for the Story of Jozic, right?

Well, bugfixes are, at the very least. There’s far more to be excited about in Update 5 than bugfixes, though… Wanna see?

STEAM LEADERBOARDS

One of the biggest requests that’s popped up every now and again since Early Access began was was Steam leaderboards. It seems like a perfect fit, right? Check in and compare yourself to other players to see how well you’re doing worldwide, maybe even compete for the world record…

With the release of Update 4, even more requests for this feature piled in, and for good reason – Rush Hour is the perfect mode for leaderboards. Speed is key, but you still need your wits to make a competent layout with limited track! Excellent for competition, right?

Well… Do you notice anything… different?

Right above the timer is a second clock! Instead of telling you how long you’ve been playing for, it displays one of the following times:

• Your Previous Record
• The Best among your Friends
• The Global Highscore

On the right, it’ll show you how much better (or worse!) you’re doing in comparison to the record you’re comparing against. This way, you can gauge how well you’re doing in this current run.

When you complete a wave, you can see some information about your performance compared to whatever benchmark you’ve been keeping track of. You can toggle between a graph that shows you your progress wave-by-wave or a leaderboard that shows your standing for that wave in comparison to multiple people.

Once you’ve finished the last wave, your score will automatically be submitted to the leaderboards. How well did you do? Only one way to find out…

In the main menu, you can see your leaderboard placement right next to your score. Oh, yeah, scores have gotten WAY larger, too. See that 35k? A bit of an outlier, but still, quintiple-digit scores are pretty easy to get now, when previously they were unheard of. This’ll help separate old scores from the new!

Speaking of the main menu…

MAIN MENU OPTIONS

Right now, it’s… honestly, kind of a pain to load older saves, start new playthroughs, or edit/delete maps from the main menu. The three dots in the upper-right corner of a map’s preview are pretty tiny and easy to miss…

No need for any of that hassle anymore, though.

Now, just hovering over the preview will bring up all the icons you’ll need! No more struggle with accidentally loading the last save instead of starting a new game.

For Rush Hour, we’ve also added a brand-new feature to go with this – Seeded runs! If you’d like to play the map over and over again while keeping the same set of trains, just type in whatever you’d like – up to 6 characters long – and the game will always give you the same results!

NEW MAPS

When Rush Hour first released back in Update 4, there weren’t many official maps for the mode; Just two, one of which was a repurposed endless map. While Rush Hour certainly has its replay value, with each new run being a chance to beat your highest score or find a new technique to play better, two maps is still prettttty low.

Well, with the next update, we’re fixing that! Plenty of new maps – most based on real locations! – will be showing up in the next update.

London DLR

Mess around in a simpler experience on London’s Dockland Light Railway around West India Quay!

Central Tokyo

Give Central Tokyo‘s network a hand, with fairly high train throughput in the later waves! Just remember you can right-click to reverse trains in busy platforms if you ever need to…

Chicago Ogilvie Center

Try managing one of the many major stations in the heart of Chicago, Ogilvie Transit Center! Don’t let the extreme amount of trains intimidate you…

That’s not all, though! A few more maps are being worked on, but we aren’t quite ready to show you those… Keep an eye out for more to come!

EDITOR TOOLS

As some of you may know – and many may not, as we only mentioned this in our Community Discord – Rush Hour waves can actually be split into multiple parts if you know what you’re doing.

Well, now you don’t need to know what you’re doing! At least, it’s going to be much, much easier to set up. Want trains of a certain type to only start spawning midway through the wave? Want a massive push of trains before the wave stops spawning things? Maybe just want to give the player a breather before the difficulty picks up again?

This finer level of control should allow you to build the best Rush Hour map you can ever imagine, and also make it MUCH easier to understand what you’re doing as you build your map.

Update 5: May 16th!

…Oh, and did we mention how soon the update’s going to release? Mark your Calendars for May 16th!

As always, happy dispatching!

– The Rail Route Team

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