Customer Reviews

Railroad Tycoon II: Platinum Edition

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Platinum Edition lumps the original game with several add-on packages.

Let's start off with a few things:

Yes, this is an old game. And, yes, you can probably pick it up for $20 (or less). And, yes, there is a newer version of RailRoad Tycoon out.

But I personally don't find the newer version to be as much fun as this one.

The graphics aren't striking. There's no whiz-bang 3-D animation. There's only strategy.

The scenarios seem easy enough:

"Create a railroad company, and lay track from Baltimore to Washington DC. Make 10 journeys with a train full of people in 10 years and win this scenario."

Or

"Connect New York to Chicago, carry 10 trainloads of passengers between these cities and have a company book value of $10 million. You have 20 years."

Okay, these may not be the exact scenarios, but they're close.

This game isn't just laying track and putting trains on them. You've got to create trains to do specific tasks. Start at a Iron mine with 2 cars full or iron, run to a Coal mine and pick up 2 additional cars, run to a steel mill and wait for the steel to be made, then off to a Tool and Die company for goods, now deliver those goods to a city and start it over again.

The scenarios are challenging, and fun. Sometimes it's not about running trains, but how well you run a company--or how well you play the stock market.

In RRT2 you get:

===North America===
The Iron Seed: Mid-Atlantic states
Handle on The Breadbasket: Eastern USA
Bridging a Nation: Western USA
Silver Booms and the Market Busts: Southwestern USA
Whistle Stop and Promises: Northwestern USA
Crossing the Great Divide: Canada

===Europe===
Birth of the Iron Horse: Britain
Excess on the Orient Express: Europe
Knitting with Iron: Germany
Next Stop the 20th Century: France
Through The Brenner Pass: Alps
When Walls Come Down: Eastern Europe

===World===
Croissants vs Crumpets: India
Which Way to the Coast?: Australia
The Samurai Rides an Iron Horse: Japan
The People's Train: China
Dilemma Down Under: Australia
Cape to Cairo: Africa

as well as the Second Century Expansion pack which takes you into the 20th century with new challenges and newer trains.
Including getting supplies to ports in America to be delivered to Europe for World War 2, running trains in the Eastern Block and Moscow during the Cold War, running commuter trains in the Northwest and a few science-fiction 'future' scenarios centering around a geo-thermal plant in Spain.


I found this game very addictive, fun and still enjoyable years after my initial purchase.

Well worth the money. And you can find online guides to help you if you get stuck.

If you have used the original Railroad Tycoon or Tycoon II then you will be ready for this extended version.
More scenarios, more maps, more music and new features like being able to bridge wider bodies of water.
This is Railroad Tycoon for the 21st Century, and a lot of fun too.
Railroad Tycoon II Platinum

I recall playing Railroad Tycoon 1 with much more excitement than in this version. Perhaps, I was more of kid back then, but the setup of campaigns takes some of the fun out of the game. Each campaign has a goal and depending on how well you do, you are awarded either bronze, silver, or gold. I agree that the campaigns are a good way to walk the user through the game and introduce various ways to win each campaign, but it gets old after the first scenario. Other than that, RT2 is a good follow up game to the original. It has most everything the first did and even more. I like how the stock market is in the game, even issuing bonds and shorting stocks. The track and station build is improved and the graphics were good for its time. Overall, I still recommend the game, but I would have rather have a single goal game, which is to win.

Love the game just what we wanted. Bob was an Engineer on the BNSF RR and this just keeps him busy. He had the gold addition but thinks this is a better version.

This is the worst game I have ever played. I bought it as a present for my brother, who is a fanatic about railroads. He knows everything about them. Good thing too, because only a fanatic would be able to tolerate this game let alone play it. I tried it, and so did 4 other people in my family. We all agreed that the graphics are terrible. You can't even see what's going on. I tried the tutorial version, and nothing helped me. No tutorial ever happened. I was just thrown into the game. It is hard to distinguish between which train line is which, since one city can have more then one train line. I tried to add cars to a train and nothing happened. I tried to retire a train and nothing happened. When I finally got everything connected (or so I thought), my yearly report showed that my trains had made no money, doing nothing.
I would never recommend this product. If you have ordered, cancel while you still can. (By the way, my fanatic brother still loves it for some reason, even though the rest of my family hates it. Go figure)