Rail Road Tycoon II

by PopTop Software & Gathering of Developers, 1998

Product Features

• System Requirements: An IBM PC or compatible Pentium 133 MHz (or faster) with: 16 MB RAM; a 4x CD-ROM drive; 220 MB free hard drive space; a DirectX compatible video card; and Windows 95 / 98 / ME.

Product Details

• ASIN: B00001ZULH
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 4.8 x 0.4 inches ; 4 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #27,687 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

More than just some Lionel train spinning around inside your TV, Railroad Tycoon 2 is an accurate simulation of the history and ruthless capitalism of the railroad industry. Play as one of more than 40 magnates in 18 realistic campaigns that take place between the dawn of the locomotive and tomorrow's sleek bullet trains. You'll buy land, lay track, hire managers, and, most of all, keep your trains on time. Keep an eye on the region's economy, or your competition may just come and eat your lunch.

GameSpot Review

Railroad Tycoon II gives you the responsibility of running your own railroad and charges you with the task of turning a tiny company into a powerful empire. Although it is a somewhat simplified version of its PC brother, the objective of the PlayStation version can be just as daunting. Not only must you worry about laying track, managing stations, hauling cargo, and keeping your trains running, but you must also keep an eye on the stock market and maintain the country's economy. All of this translates into one immersive experience, as Railroad Tycoon II successfully re-creates the burdened feeling the owners of actual railroads must have felt. There are three game modes - a campaign mode, which places you in a preset scenario and gives you certain objectives to complete within an established time limit; a scenario mode, which lets you pick a map, a date, and a difficulty level then simply lets you build a railroad; and a sandbox mode, where you're given an unlimited supply of resources so you can build the railroad of your dreams without having to worry about profits or reality. But the true flexibility of Railroad Tycoon II comes with the different configurations for each mode - the campaign mode lets you decide what advantage your company starts with, and the scenario mode lets you set several different variables - from profit multiplier, to economic model, to AI difficulty. In addition, while the towns and landmasses of the maps never change, different plants and town demands are randomized in the scenario mode, keeping you from playing the same game twice. Unfortunately, Railroad Tycoon II doesn't let you save in the middle of your game - the save function is missing from the scenario game, and the campaign mode only saves information on the campaigns you've completed. This makes truly getting into Railroad Tycoon II a time-consuming process, as you must set aside plenty of time to play or risk leaving your PlayStation on for extended periods of time. Most of the game progresses in the actual map window - this is where you can see your railroad's layout and watch your trains move from one station to the next. Lining the sides of the map window are different submenus, where you can manage other areas of your railroad - from purchasing trains, to assigning routes and cargo, to upgrading stations and playing with the stock market. All of these screens have buttons that lead into each other, making moving through screens and managing several different aspects quick and easy. Once you've made your run through the different menus you can return to the map window to watch your empire grow. While the PlayStation's controller usually doesn't lend itself to a game so dependent on a cursor, Railroad Tycoon II overcomes this problem by making great use of the analog control. You use the analog function to move the cursor exactly as a mouse would, while the D-pad is used to quickly move between different options. In addition, Railroad Tycoon II is full of controller shortcuts. You can move between options with lightning speed once you're used to the shortcuts. All of this makes Railroad Tycoon II's detailed menu system extremely bearable. Railroad Tycoon II takes place in actual global locations, including the British Isles, Korea, and the Midwestern United States. Each map is realistically detailed, giving Railroad Tycoon II a refreshingly realistic feel to it. In addition, inventions and scientific progress happen according to real-life dates. New engines are introduced into the game in exactly the same year they were in real history, events occur on their actual dates, and managers who apply to your railroad are actual historic figures, each with advantages and disadvantages that are based on that person's historic accomplishments. While graphics may not be all that important in a game like this, Railroad Tycoon II still sports some fairly nice ones. The various buildings and plants have their own distinctive look, and once you learn which building produces what, it's easy to tell what cargo should go where. In addition, your trains look different, depending on the engine and the kind of cargo you're running. This makes managing cargo that much easier, as you can easily identify what needs to be shipped by looking at the cars instead of the cargo names. Instead, it's the sound that disappoints in this game. While the game features a nice bluegrass tune over the main menus, the actual gameplay is devoid of any background music, leaving you to go slowly insane listening to the chug-a-lug sounds of your trains and the cash register noise whenever they deliver to a station. Solid gameplay, numerous options, and attention to detail make Railroad Tycoon II an excellent simulation. While the premise of running a virtual railroad might not be as exciting as other sim games, Railroad Tycoon II keeps things interesting with a complex game mechanic that hides behind a simple layout. While the lack of a save feature could have made this game that much more bearable, Railroad Tycoon II still lets the child inside you build the railroad of your dreams while the adult inside you keeps it running.--Ben Stahl--Copyright © 1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Deserves negative stars, March 13, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Rail Road Tycoon II (Video Game)

I wish I could give less than one star. This game is fun, and you can build a massive railroad empire stretching from one coast to the other. I agree with the other review that the text is hard to read, but I could deal with that. The manual with the game is confusing and leaves out A LOT of information, but I could deal with that. The graphics are nowhere near as good as what I would expect, but I can deal with that. You can spend hours building a railroad, but you can't save your game. That's right, you can spend hours working to get that railroad connected from New York to Los Angeles, build up your company, and get just the manager you want. Then the need for sleep or food arrives, and you have to turn off the system and start over. The only saving available is when you have finished on of the scenarios, and you still can't go back and build on what you had won the scenario with, you have to start over again.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars fun...but frustrating, October 29, 2001

By 

Bob Manson (Berkeley, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rail Road Tycoon II (Video Game)

I bought this game quite a while ago, but I hadn't spent much time playing with it--I tried it once, but I wasn't able to easily figure out how the game worked and the manual is lacking in several areas. Now that I've spent a couple of days poking at it...

There are two really major problems with the game: you can't save incomplete games, and a really obnoxious lockup problem, at least on my PS2.

The inability to save in-progress games is understandable--it would be a challenge to get even a single map to fit on a memory card. 128K isn't much room for this sort of game.

The lockup problem happens randomly when I'm in one of the menus. It's happened three times in a row after I've spent an hour or two building a really complex rail network (in one of the Australian scenarios), and thanks to the lack of a save feature that means all the work I've done is lost. Admittedly it may be PS2-related, but it would be the first PS2-specific game problem I've run into (and I've tried at least 50 old PlayStation games on it).

The interface is poorly implemented, which added to my initial frustration with trying to learn the game. It takes a long time to become comfortable navigating the menus with the joypad... what it really needs is a mouse. The most noticeable issue is that the pad behavior is inconsistent. In some screens the pad moves the cursor around the screen, but in other screens it performs other functions like highlighting buttons even though the cursor is still on the screen. (I could go on for hours about other problems with the controls, but I won't bother...)

Other people have mentioned graphics and text issues, but I haven't found these to be major issues. I suspect the text would be hard to read on a small TV, and the font they used isn't that good. The graphics aren't super, but they aren't horrible either--they're adequate. No music? That's a feature!

Once I got over the initial "how does this work?" part Railroad Tycoon II turned out to be a really fun game; it ranks up there with SimCity or any of the other classic simulation games. But the Playstation version just wasn't a good idea, especially with the lack of a save feature; I'll be playing the Linux version instead.

13 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Buy a 286 & The Original Game!, February 25, 2000

By A Customer

= Durability:5.0 out of 5 stars  = Fun:2.0 out of 5 stars  = Educational:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Rail Road Tycoon II (Video Game)

There are some things that, no matter how lovingly and desparately people want to improve them - it just doesn't work. RailRoad Tycoon is one of them. This game for Playstation or the PC is very pretty and it works to some extent, but after a few weeks of trying, I went back to the original, ugly old EGA game, that works so well. You can pick up an old 286 and an original copy of RRT at the auction for less than the price of RRT II and you will have a lot more fun! A tip if you try and run the original RRT on newer hardware, you might have to pick MCGA or EGA on the opening screen - don't worry, it's the same graphics but some new hardware doesn't like the old VGA driver. Take it from someone who has been playing RRT since the days of the XT, the appeal of the game is in the AI, not in pretty graphics. The new version is just too slow in unfolding, too far off the economic mark and somehow loses the magic in the translation to 3-D.