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
Read More: Best Strategy Trains Games.
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
RollerCoaster Tycoon® 3: Complete Edition
Recommended as a classic game and, in my opinion, one of the most entertaining management sims out there. If you want to relive your childhood, or just give one of the classics a shot, go for it.
If you already own the game however, don’t bother. As a lot of the other reviews state, this is not a remaster, and its not a very good attempt at making the game “HD” either. Lacks basic support for what you’d consider HD 10 years ago, with an aged and outdated options menu. Had to manually edit the options.txt to fit the game to a 1920x1200 monitor (located in appdata/Frontier for anyone with the same issue).
– Real player with 121.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Strategy Building Games.
Hands down the best way to play this what I like to call a timeless classic. Sure, the graphics haven’t exactly aged the best, but that’s what also gives this title its charm in my opinion. It’s so easy to pick up and play, and it’s easy to just have fun with it, whether you’re making your own park, or playing a scenario. It has what feels like endless replayability, too, as not two playthroughs feel the same, even if the objectives are the same. I did experience a few crashes here and there, though, like the game freezing when I try to place a ride. And sometimes it does get to the point where I have to force close it with Task Manager since I can’t do anything else. Not to mention it does crash unexpectedly somewhat frequently whenever I would stream this game on one of my Discord servers, which is pretty annoying. But regardless, I’m still happy that this is available, and still be able to play one of my childhood favorites. RCT3 might very be my most-played game of all time, and I’m honestly okay with that. It’s just so much fun!
– Real player with 114.5 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 Strategy Trains 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
1980
Quite fun, quite well executed, it’s a small game but what it does, it generally does well.
The one criticism I have to make concerns “gentrification”. I know what gentrification is, I’ve spent the last twenty years living in Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle, all cities where gentrification has happened. The issue of poor people being priced out of their city is one that I’m aware of. It’s a complex issue - it’s bad for the working class population, but quite nice for the upper-middle-class upwards, because the whole city is reshaped for them; very often the city as a whole thrives. Forty years ago, Catherine street in Toxteth in Liverpool was the scene of rioting; today you pretty much have to be a millionaire to own a house there. The people who used to live there have been pushed out. As to whether you think that’s fair, that probably depends how wealthy you are, and whether you’re on the left or the right politically. It’s currently a live issue in Manchester; regeneration of the northern English former industrial cities was done by giving developers free rein to gentrify at will. The cities were risen from their ashes, essentially at a cost to their working-class populations.
– Real player with 9.0 hrs in game
This game is not bad, but it’s very unsatisfying.
I understand that you can’t really “win”, that’s the premise of the game.
I started several times and tried almost every possible approach to get all the first missions done, but it seems like that is not possible?! Or there is maybe like one combination/timing, which will make is possible and I wasn’t able to find out how.
If somebody knows, make a comment!
Now it just felt unsatisfying, that I was neither able to finish the missions nor the game in a good way and it was a more frustrating than enjoyable experience. If this is intended due to the urbanization story, okay, but I didn’t liked it.
– Real player with 5.5 hrs in game
Rise of Industry
What is Rise of Industry?
Rise of Industry is an economic sim game where you can produce various goods from raw materials to complex products, like a modern Industry Giant.
What is Rise of Industry not?
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It is not a new Capitalism game.
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It is not a city builder.
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It is definitely not an OpenTTD imitation.
What is it like?
This is the basic gameplay of Rise of Industry: you extract raw materials, which you can either sell (if there is demand for it) or use to produce more valuable end products. You then sell the products to various shops in the game’s towns. Sounds simple? Well, it’s not that simple.
– Real player with 301.9 hrs in game
This game is one of the most tedious enterprises to appear in recent memory. It’s fun to a point, and then it isn’t.
The Good:
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Decent presentation, decent graphics and many settings.
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While a bit clicky, simple A to B works OK.
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Very helpful the game remembers how many at a destination so you don’t have to set it all the time.
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The Auto warehouses help with the tedium a ton.
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The Dev is very involved day to day, and though not always in a helpful way there is no doubt he is passionate about his creation.
– Real player with 47.2 hrs in game
This Is the Police
After finishing the main storyline of this game and playing it for ~29 hours, I am incredibly torn on this game. I love it, and yet, there’s some parts of it that really bother me. Ahead may be some spoilers, but I will try to put those in between tags.
Let’s talk core gameplay loop first. There are so many cases you will send officers to and many you will get through through simple math which the game explains to you very early on. This is the basis, but the game offers many distractions. The community will come calling, as will city hall and eventually, bad guys in multiple different shapes. This will eventually get incredibly hectic, which I experienced as fun. There’s a detective (and one other) minigame where you try to piece together the cases frame by frame and I simply loved it to pieces.
– Real player with 31.4 hrs in game
I always have a difficult time writing a negative review about a game that I liked for the most part. So how about I do this: I will first tell you what I really liked about the game, because, if you do like it yourself, you should totally buy it. And then I will explain what I really hated about it.
If you don’t like to read, then watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlLk-t-kCl0
And yeah, I fixed the sound and redid the vid.
So what did I like about the game?
1. 80% of the story. The story is brilliant for the most part. I love novels that put the protagonist up the wall, and when he/she tries to react, they get their backs pushed further up the wall to the point of barely having any control of the situation.
– Real player with 27.6 hrs in game
Basement
Well, that was 30 hours of weird. This game is so…odd that it’s really hard to parse my thoughts on it. It’s fun and the achievements were actually fun to 100% (and it’s one of the only games I’ve ever bothered doing that with), so I’d have to recommend it, but it’s also a bit buggy and stupidly hard so I’ll need to add some disclaimers.
At its core this is a fun “easy to learn, hard to master” management game, where you run a drug empire starting small and snowballing your way to a roller-coaster of an ending with a final level that was not fun, but was definitely an experience. The game eases you into the mechanics over the course of several levels, and there’s a lot of midlevel twists that can screw you over, but also add a lot of depth to the characters and some challenge. It punishes inefficiency, but rewards thinking ahead. The difficulty is over the top at first, but once you understand how to play the game it all falls into place. You’re always given the tools to solve your problems, if you manage your resources and employees correctly. What RNG does exist in this game usually falls in your favor by way of lucky loot drops from defeated enemies.
– Real player with 29.7 hrs in game
General Opinions about the game.
- Opinions
The game is certainly interesting nothing like what I’ve played before. I will take a second to mention that i have played for 24 hours so i feel i know the game pretty well.
From what i have played and experience this is a snow ball of pain, along the lines it starts easy and ramps up in difficulty dramatically in a short amount of time due to there only
being 12 levels.
It has been an enjoyable experience but a grindy one, it should be said the later levels become stupidly hard to the point we’re you might be trying to beat levels over and over again slowly building frustration.
– Real player with 24.9 hrs in game
Empire of Sin
Main quests:
- So far two of the paythroughs I have had have game breaking bugs for the main quests.
Police:
There is not enough interaction with the police, they are basically not even a problem. Give them more power, create tiers of police, where there are cops, investigators, feds, etc. Make it so that if you piss the police of by killing a lot of people you get a heat system.
Economy:
There is apparently a non ending need for alcohol, the game would be more interesting if your bar saw less profits and patronage because your neighboring faction has a better bar, higher quality booze, etc.
– Real player with 63.3 hrs in game
Seems like the game has that weird Paradox disease where the game is garbage day one but undergoes radical changes that make it into something really special. I bought it after the precinct update and I’m hooked. I like the combat and gang management elements as well as the almost seamless switching from tactical map to street view to turn based combat. There’s also room for strategy, you can cut off sections of someone’s territory to destroy their supply lines or trade poison disguised as high end alcohol to set some one up for the moment you take out their brewery in an ambush leaving them with nothing to sell and no one to sell it to. I think that it’d be a whole lot better with more room for customization but it’s a solid solid game.
– Real player with 56.0 hrs in game
Freight Tycoon Inc.
I really liked this game, I only downvoted because I want a mixed review and at the time I wrote the review, 62% voted for up.
Pity pity pity, this is actually a great game, I like it very much, and it is of great value, got from steam sale for less then 2USD.
Gameplay is extrememly straight forward, you take contract from firms and construct enough vehicle to take the order and make profit, and grow. Breakdown may happen, depending on your luck and how well your maintanence is, you get some trivial company management variables, hire some manager and boost X% of your blablabla.
– Real player with 57.1 hrs in game
This game is enjoyable if you like sims like this. Relax set up lines of transport, pick up contracts make cash etc.
There are some game breakers in this though and the developer really has not tried to fix them even though its been out for years. For example the campaign has a bad map in the middle of the series. You cant go past it, I have not been able to win it due to some horrid map planning and the way your trucks behave at load and deliver points.
Basically on map 12 of the campaign you lose due to almost all freight you have to deal with goes to one place and the AI competitor on that map basically clogs this point up so bad that no matter what you do most of your contracts will fail and make you go bankrupt after a while. The map would do fine as a sand box map but since its a campaign map and you need this delivery point you will simply not be able to play the campaign maps past this point which is still about half the maps in the campaign.
– Real player with 46.5 hrs in game
Anticorps VR
Complete strategy game, mix between management and city-builder with a dose of tower defense but, here no pre-defined box, or unique courses, it is very clear in VR and without alliasing. We are on the best VR strategy game far superior to my other strat games on VR.
We are very free in the approach of the game (be it the movements or the strategy), good replayability levels are procedurally generated at each game. I am 6 hours of play and I beat half of the game, there’s a challenge. The game requires a little grip because of these many possibilities and its depth. Party purposes are epics
– Real player with 9.5 hrs in game
I wish it was easier. I never understood how to play the game. I kept running out of water but when I put down the water tower it didn’t work. The tutorial is completely broken. I remember having to look up a Youtube video of you playing the game to understand more. I would love a easy mode or a mode where there’s only one supplies your trying to maintain. I enjoyed it. I just wish it was more well explained.
– Real player with 2.0 hrs in game