Cargo Company
At present: very rough around the edges in the UI department, with a very tedious menu/window navigation scheme and hierarchy. Taking users through many pages of data that is both largely uninformative as well as redundant eventually requiring one to open window after window to reach the end of a menu thread which sometimes yields informative data or a shortcut to a specific object. Also featuring a very basic pathfinding logic regarding railroad placement which will very quickly bog down rail based transportation if not managed personally with signals and the “specific track placement tool.”
– Real player with 9.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Management Economy Games.
I’m quite new to this kind of game. Played some Open TTD before, which i enjoy a lot (free here on steam, check it out!)
This has a lot of the same concepts as Open TTD but expands on it in a smart way (settle on other planets like moon and you can have interplanetary supply chains that come with it).
Played for a couple of hours now and did not encounter any major problems. For an EA title this game is perfectly playable for me. I hope they will add some other methods of transportation in the future like ships and airplanes.
– Real player with 8.6 hrs in game
Railroad Corporation
Updated July 9, 2019
I have now played the campaign through twice and have learned a lot since the below review.
The game remains fun and I really cannot wait for the coming updates, because this game has a lot of promise. Some of the problems I had at first have been eliminated by getting better at the game the way it is now.
-Track laying- the first time through I was doing was overloading the network with too many trains and a lot of crossovers and intersections. The routing does need to be improved but with careful planning, future bottlenecks can be eliminated. Upgrade your stations and invest in train research ASAP. This will allow longer and faster trains, that takes care of the problem of clogging the network with slow and over worked trains. Also build sidings frequently so trains can bypass each other easily.
– Real player with 724.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Management Historical Games.
See those cool videos ? They aren’t in the game. The general overhead view is what you will be seeing. I expected to be able to zoom in and move the camera to see cool things like in the videos (coal beingg loaded, trains going over bridges all like they show in the videos) Unfortunately that isn’t what you get to see, it may be clips you see in some later mission of the video (that I haven’t gotten to yet).
Overall, though, the game is a good financial strategy management game. I do miss the old days of RRT and 2 where you lay each small section of track individually, looking at the cost and elevations and having to decide if it was worth it in the long run to go through, over or around a mountain etc. But, strategically the game is definately a breath of fresh air for those that enjoy doing research, buying industries and managing trains and growing cities whose demands change over time.. I do kinda wish there was a log of how each city is changing as it pops up and is gone what the city is no longer needing or is now needing (it seems the game has been kinda “dumbed down” for those that don’t really want to immerse themselves in the grand strategy of it all).
– Real player with 59.5 hrs in game
Railroad Tycoon 3
Ah Railroad Tycoon 3, my childhood. Before I go any further, the game WILL work on Vista and Windows 7. Go to http://hawkdawg.com/ to find patches for blurry textures and the Vista fix.
Railroad Tycoon 3 is the third installment of the Railroad Tycoon series. Developed by PopTop Software and The Gathering of Developers, Railroad Tycoon 3 introduces the 3D engine to the Railroad Tycoon series. Railroad Tycoon 3 has three main game modes. Campaign, Sandbox, and Scenarios. If you want to play a challenging campaign mode, you have it, or if you just want to go and lay some track, you can do that too. In campaign mode, there are three difficulties; Easy, Medium, and Hard. You can choose between 25 different games to choose from, and can go from left to right, or start at the hardest one. In scenario mode, you play against a computer player on a selected map, and race to be the highest company to win. In sandbox mode, you pick a map and time period, and then go have fun!
– Real player with 160.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Management Real-Time with Pause Games.
The game gets a thumbs up. Classic and tons of fun.
Edit: It does seem to crash very frequently, however. I guess that’s what you get with a game as old as this one.
Cannot, however, give a thumbs up to Steam support on this one. As many others have said, you will most likely find that it crashes within seconds of launching the app. This is because of a default setting that conflicts with just about every modern video card. You won’t be able to get into the settings menu to fix this, crashes too quckly. If you run into this problem, you will have to go to a third party site and download an updated config file, replace the original, and then the game will function. The file is safe, the people who created this have my gratitude, but customers SHOULD NOT have to be subjected to downloading a file from a third party site in order to use a product they’ve been charged for. Upon contacting Steam support, they offered no assistance with this matter. I asked for a refund, was denied (i was outside of the timeframe so that was expected), but I also received no attempt from support to get the game running. The last part should not have happened, no excuse for that. At that point, I finally went ahead and downloaded the file (I was not comfortable doing this). Glad to say it worked :)
– Real player with 158.5 hrs in game
Railroad Tycoon II Platinum
I have played this game from the CD for many hours, just bought Steam version. You may trust my review.
This ain’t yo mamma’s kind of game. No this ain’t. Railroad Tycoon 2, in my opinion the best of all train games new or old, is one that’ll make you frustrated by all means whilst keeping you up till all hours of the night. Let me explain why.
The rail building is not easy. You must pick your terrain carefully and stategically. Mountains will cost you more, and slow your trains down. Plains are cheaper and don’t require heavy-duty 3-Truck Shay trains. Deciding which cities to connect together via a rail also takes thought. The larger the city, the more passenger and mail revenue is to be had. The maps in this game are realistically made (Alaska map looks like Alaska).
– Real player with 281.2 hrs in game
10/10
Quite possibly the perfect game!
RRT2, how do I love thee, let me count the ways! The original RRT was a brilliant game that launched a whole new world of strategy and simulation that had nothing to do with devastating enemy civilizations or killing orcs. You combined construction, trains, and building a business in a way that created almost limitless hours of play. Almost! RRT2 did away with almost.
Let’s start with it’s a pretty game, designed by the same folks as Tropico. Buildings and locomotives are beautifully rendered and can be viewed from any angle. The terrain graphics were state of the art in 1998 and hold up well today. But there is so much more. You have industries in cities that convert raw materials from farms, mills, mines, etc., into products that you can then further ship on (and make money for.) You can even buy these industries. Haul your own coal and iron ore to your own steel mill, and then send the steel to your auto plant. And cities grow and develop the more you serve them. The economic model is incredibly detailed. All the usual refinements of bonds, stocks, take-overs, etc. And you can hire famous managers who bring their own unique traits to your railroad.
– Real player with 178.4 hrs in game
Sid Meier’s Railroads!
Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon was the third game I ever purchased back in the 1800’s, no, I’m kidding (Though it feels like it at times.) I actually purchased it in 1990 not long after acquiring my first desktop PC. I have played the series religiously since. I have roughly 100 hours in this game in the original 2006 disc retail box version. It certainly isn’t a successor to the venerable Railroad Tycoon III, but it’s still quite enjoyable if you realize this going in. The game is more of a “beer & pretzels” type real time strategy game with an emphasis on attracting more casual type gamers. The game has a charming art style more akin to an HO or N scale model train layout than the ostensible real world look of the previous Railroad Tycoon games.
– Real player with 131.1 hrs in game
I’m big on train games. I’m also not the most educated on the finer details of signalling and routing, and find the concepts confusing. I enjoy the business aspects of railroad games more, and like games that let me focus on that.
Sid Meier’s Railroads does just that. It is a very approachable, enjoyable take on the transportation tycoon genre. Block signalling is automatically done for your tracks, and is easy to understand. You get to focus on the fundamentals: what industries have goods? What industries need goods? How can I get from A to B profitably? That is what the game gets fantastically well.
– Real player with 85.9 hrs in game
STATIONflow
Short version: Oh my, this is challenging and fun. I definitely like it more than I expected to!
Long version:
Deceptively simple at first then gets increasingly more difficult as you progress.
I don’t usually enjoy games that don’t have you working towards a specific, set goal, but this one makes it work by having “unlockables” to strive for, different levels with different challenges to them, and a cash incentive to go along with your score, so if you want to stay afloat, you’d be better off catering to all the possible exits/entrances/lines, which makes it challenging. Plus, while it never flat out FORCES YOU to, it’s implied that your “goal” is to serve all possible lines and entrances/exits.
– Real player with 47.8 hrs in game
This is exactly the kind of game I’m wired to enjoy; route-planning, optimization, and a small sprinkling of tedium. For the first 10 to 15 hours with the game I very much did enjoy it but as some of the issues became really obvious it led me to the conclusion that I cannot give a recommendation to this game in its current form.
My first issue is with the amount of content available in the game. As new NPC types are unlocked and develop new needs you will have some difficulty keeping up with it all, but that suddenly drops off after a couple hours of play leaving you with nothing much to do but optimize your network and build out the last couple stations that unlock later. There really needs to be more variety in NPC needs to flush out that mid to late-game. Perhaps more late-game shop types or new transportation methods, but it needs something. As it is there are 4 hours of laying the foundation for your system and expanding, 2 hours of optimizing, then an hour of doing nothing but watching your system operate until you decide to start a new map.
– Real player with 34.3 hrs in game
Train Fever
When this game first came out it was a little buggy, and people expected huge things from a developers début title. Which is a silly thing to do for any new developer. (I blame the amazing trailer)
Pro:
- What do you mean 40 degree incline? - You can’t build wildly inaccurate track as you can in most games, the track has to be quite straight and realistic causing most initial plans that you would try to reuse from other games like TT and RT to be thrown out almost instantly and real planning to come in.
– Real player with 491.9 hrs in game
This game always felt like a very expensive Beta. And it is. It’s a 40 dollar beta. It is unsettling knowing that the devs can essentially take the money and run at any point. Though, they’ve stuck with it so far.
So…why shouldn’t you get this game?
As stated, it’s simply not finished. This is hearlding to be the next Transport Tycoon/Locomotion. And it’s just not that. Want to electrify all your rails? Click every individual section, miss one and your train wont run. Don’t know what section you missed? Good luck finding it.
– Real player with 395.6 hrs in game
A-Train PC Classic / みんなのA列車で行こうPC
A-Train PC Classic is a real estate development game, disguised as a train game. Yes, you manage trains, but the real strategy is in buying up land, making it valuable, and building condos and offices on top of it to make money. The job of your transit network is to stimulate demand, not to actually turn a profit. Instead, you’ll be buying up all the land in some sleepy suburb, running a train to it, and then selling the land for double the price you bought it. Better yet, you can skip the middleman and do the construction yourself, and be the sole owner of an entire city worth of apartments and movie theaters.
– Real player with 520.5 hrs in game
What a wonderful game. Honestly. It’s worth the money for sure.
If you’re a fan of OpenTTD (or similar), but felt like the money management aspect was too simple, and/or the game was too shallow, then this game is for you.
You can make long- or short-term investments into stocks of other companies for extra cash or losses (and others can invest into your company).
You can personally transform a tiny town into a striving metropolis by connecting it to your network and regularly servicing it with a passenger train, then constructing some small residential towers or commercial buildings that will also be an extra source of income.
– Real player with 126.9 hrs in game
Red Trains
Red Trains is a strategic simulator game. Build tracks to connect industry and cities. Customize locomotive designs to optimize for particular goods and routes. Manage your political clout to avoid being removed from your post.
Train Design
Train design involves balancing train strength, speed, and capacity to optimize various cargo types and different length routes.
Research
In Red Trains, research progresses automatically without your input. The People’s Republic never stands still. You can, however, affect the direction of research and make requests for particular areas to be investigated. Research unlocks components for train design, increases production, and even enable new types of rail tracks.
Signals
To better manage train pathing and scheduling use signals. While collisions never happen in the People’s Republic, deadlocks and other problems can occur if signals are not skillfully and carefully placed.
Story Scenarios
Twelve novel scenarios with light story to provide alternative play experiences.
Transport Fever
Hi all,
If you look for a management game with a complex economy where you need an calculater to do the maths before you do anything in the game then TP is not for you. If you look for a game which is as realistic as the real world then TP is also not for you and you may want to stop reading now.
If you look for a sandbox game which is easy to learn and gives you an infinite amount of maps where every map puts you in front of new challenges then you may want to continue reading.
Transport Fever works just fine on any computer with better hardware than the minimum requirements. Its not recommended to play the game with just the minimum requirements but i am sure it will work.
– Real player with 1601.1 hrs in game
150 years of transportation, no accidents, no late arrivals, no lost luggage and no downtime.
This game is addictive. It’s a great overall game, with lots of potential to grow and improve. In terms of stability, I’ve not experience many crashes or bugs, except for out-of-date mod, which have been corrected since. There is a little bit of frame drop late game, but nothing to get crazy about, as it happen mostly mid and end month when there is high budget calculations with a very heavy network. It is very fluid and pleasant to grow a game into late stages. Game mechanic and coding are very stable and well done. Graphics, textures details, sound and soundtrack are above average.
– Real player with 649.6 hrs in game