After a 90-second electrical fault left me stuck for two hours at Wilmslow station this weekend, I could be fooled into thinking trains are delicate fickle things. However, PROFITS 2167: Planetary Resource Optimization & Freight Infrastructure Technician Simulator is here to set me straight. The game puts you in the driver’s seat on a train rattling along the tracks of a deep space mining operation. A mining operation under assault from thousands of space bugs.

Avanti West Coast might struggle on hot days (and cold days, and wet days, and windy days…), but when you’re behind the wheel of Profits 2167’s locomotive, you’ll have to plough straight through the swarming insect masses.

Profits 2167 is a hodge podge of genres jumbled together. It’s part incremental game, part roguelite, and a smidge of tower defence. In each run you’re in a race against the clock to refine as many minerals as you can before your shift is over. Drilling stations are dotted around each map, linked together by train tracks. You must travel between them, stopping to load up on minerals, and then ferrying them back to the central hub for processing.

The more resources you refine, the more you have to spend on upgrades between missions. That’s the incremental game bit. Upgrades might increase your shift time, or add extra trucks to your train, or expand their storage capacity. There’s no strategy to these upgrades, you just buy whichever ones you can afford, eventually acquiring the whole tech tree.

The roguelite part comes from the upgrade cards you can buy with tokens earned whenever you process minerals. These boosts only apply to your current shift, so in one run you might invest heavily in increasing your train’s speed, or its braking power, or its collision resistance. That last one comes in useful for the tower defense part.

As the drills dig up valuable ore, they emit vibrations that disturb the local population: thousands of great big space bugs. Swarms of cat and cow-sized beetles pour out of the walls of the tunnels and march on the drills to destroy them. Left unsquashed, they will tear them apart rivet by rivet. Thank goodness you’re driving a great big train that carves through space insects like fist through a house made of butter.

I found myself putting most of that incremental and roguelite business to the side when playing Profits 2167 and simply enjoying hurtling my train around the subterranean tracks. The controls are delightfully tactile. Your cursor is even an on-screen hand, and I do love those. You control the throttle by dragging a lever up and down, switch the points on upcoming junctions with another lever which you can drag to the left and right, and the brakes are engaged by yanking down on a big red handle. All of these actions are met with excessive on-screen effects. As your train picks up speed and the engines begin to overheat, steam gushes in from the sides of the screen. When you slam on the brakes, sparks fill your vision. And when you plough through the bugs, a great sea of green goo splatters up in front of your window.

As you get further through Profits 2167’s campaign and tech tree, you unlock other things to fill your time. Security guards begin to spawn at your hub, which you can then shuttle out to the drills to fight off the approaching bugs. Likewise, you can acquire and drop off repair drones that will bring a mining station back online after it’s taken too much damage. These complicating factors add pressure to your shift: should you go to the drill that’s chock full of minerals to collect, or thin out the bugs attacking a drill you recently emptied, or should you divert to drop off security guards and repair drones?

That said, throughout it all, I keep coming back to the fun of making my engine go faster and faster through the dark winding tunnels of a far flung asteroid. Rattling down rickety tracks, punching through insects and wheeling round sharp turns, like riding a rollercoaster on flying ant day.