Sid Meier's Railroads!
Review
The original concept of Railroad Tycoon turned into a fast-paced arcade-like game
by Sergio Brinkhuis
reviewed on PC
Littering the map
Sometimes it turns out that your starting location is poorly situated, making it impossible to get your first train service started. You are then forced to you sell some of your own company's shares in order to free up enough money to complete your track and buy your first train. Your competitors may have had more luck and will have an edge right from the start which you will have to work hard to overcome. Fortunately Railroads! was never meant to be a frustrating game and there is enough time to catch up with your rivals. But don't wait too long because others can buy up your shares and the Artificial Intelligence actively seeks to take over its competitors, human or otherwise.
After a couple of decades have passed, the map will have become pretty crowded and your early building spree is likely to change into optimization routine. Upgrading trains, stations, buying up businesses and adding additional lines between points that can handle more than one train at a time becomes all the rage. Perhaps you will try and find out where your competitors have lines that they are not exploiting to their fullest -or- you can try and gather enough money to buy them up.
Short, real short
Games in Sid Meier's Railroads! are rather short. For single player, I'd even say that they are unsatisfactorily short. You never really get the time to build up and tweak your empire to top performance. I have been playing the game almost since its release a couple of weeks ago and there hasn't been a single game that I felt I had received enough time to make the map my own. For me, time moves too fast and money is too easily made - even on the highest difficulty setting. On the other hand, if time would not move so fast, you would probably become fully aware of the fact that Sid Meier's Railroads! is not a very deep game. I would even go as far as to say that it is rather shallow, which fits it arcade-ish nature. But I would have loved to take the game a little further. Perhaps I was hoping for a simulator as well? I think I was and it has taken me a bit of effort to get past that expectation before I could truly start enjoying the game.
Now that I have, I can honestly say that I enjoy the game. Especially in multiplayer some of the design choices that were made, make a lot more sense. The fast paced gameplay works great in multiplayer mode and the average multiplayer game takes perhaps two hours or less. The frantic building that you already do in single player, gets a whole new dimension when you are playing against a human opponent and some games can be a real adrenaline rush.
Testing, testing 1, 2, 3
Many players, including myself (on two completely different computers that easily surpass the minimum requirements), have reported problems in the later stages of the game. I'm sorry to say that Sid Meier's Railroads! has some rather serious performance issues that become increasingly apparent as the game progresses in time and the map fills up with tracks and trains. There are also some routing and track laying bugs that make me think that the game could have been served with another month of tinkering time before hitting the shelves. A very promising patch is currently in the works and obviously the community is hoping that it will make these issues go away. In all honesty, I don't really understand how the game passed Q&A testing. As a longtime, entirely devoted Sid Meier fan, it pains me to say that in its current state, the game is not up to par with the quality standards I have come to expect from games developed by Firaxis.
Difficult
The above also makes scoring the game very difficult. Judging the game on its own merits, seeing how strong the multiplayer mode is and how much fun I'm having in the early stages of the single player game, I can easily see a 8 or a 9 on the horizon. Rushing the game however, forces me to lower the score to a 7 out of 10 and only then because I trust Firaxis to fix the bugs and performance issues in the upcoming patch.
To anyone who has bought the game and got disappointed, I would like to recommend you to try and play the game online. There is a good chance you will enjoy it a lot more there. Those who haven't bought the game yet are probably best served with the recommendation to wait until the patch comes out. Chances are that you will run into all of the problems that are plaguing the game.
For the latest news on Railroads! and the upcoming patch in particular, check our Hooked on Railroads! forums.
7.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
