Customer Reviews

Sid Meier's Railroads!

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

I've spent some good time with the game now and, despite the fact that I'm about as big a fan of Sid Meier's work as you're likely to find, have to admit disappointment with this game. When it comes right down to it, the game seems more like Sid's golf game than the original RRT. It's shallow, fast and just not nearly as fun as you'd hope.

Of course it's not all bad. The graphics are beautiful, the music is great and you actually get a real manual. The game looks nice and plays nice, even on a system which is not a true gaming rig. The animations are great as well and I love how each of the train cars at a depot have to be filled individually with coal or grain or whatever the case may be. The patent auctions are well done as well.

Unfortunately, there are a few problems with the game:

First, the game moves too quickly. For example, if you play the Eastern USA scenario, you may start in Baltimore. You can immediately join with Washington, plunk a depot in Washington, and get a little Grasshopper to run a single mail car and a single passenger car back and forth. By the time the train has made its first run from Baltimore to Washington, you'll have enough money to connect to your second city (Baltimore to Frederick). So you do that, and get your second train. Give it four or five minutes and you'll be able to either double the line between BAL and WAS or create a third line to a nearby resource. Within fifteen minutes you will have connected to every city and needed resource in the vicinity. By then your opponents (assuming you are playing against two) will have pretty well done the same so that every good-sized town has at least one connection. The opponent railroads are a complete mess, with weird overpasses and tunnels all over the place. Much like the previous iterations of RRT, the AI seems to deal with brute force rather than sophistication.

Second, the maps are too small. RRT and RRT2 had a real epic feel. RRT2 was especially good with this, allowing you to make huge railroads stretching across an entire continent. The maps in SMR are tiny in comparison and few in number. This could be my single biggest point of disappointment. It contributes, of course, to the first problem, since you now have three railroads stuck in just a small corner of a country.

Third, the financial game is shallow compared to previous RRTs. The same is true of the economies. There doesn't seem to be much sophistication in this. Also, it is very easy to make great deals of money and, because the game moves so quickly, if you take a few minutes to look around the map, you'll probably find that suddenly you've got a couple million dollars in your account. This may be less the case in the more difficult European scenarios, but certainly I haven't had any trouble making money in the US of A. The stock market offers buy and selling. There is no splitting, no short selling or anything else. There are ten shares per company and that's it. I may just be missing something, but it also seems difficult to know how much different resources are worth, which ones are the most valuable, and so on.

Fourth, there seem to be some problems with routing. It's not unusual to see trains getting all plugged up near stations, even stations with three tracks running through them. The crossovers kind of work, but not as well as you might hope. When a station gets enough traffic running through it (and that may be only 5 or 6 trains) it can really begin to bog down so trains sit endlessly without being able to unload. There have also been times when the little "end of line" roadblocks have refused to go away, even in the middle of a station. That means no trains can run past the roadblock out the other side of the station. To this point I haven't found an easy way of resolving this. I think it will prove difficult to have stations with a large number of trains accessing them.

Fifth, laying track is so automatic it's almost disappointing. Unlike previous games, there do not seem to be a lot of premiums in placing bridges or tunnels. A track running from Phoenix to Flagstaff, which requires at least one major bridge and a couple of long tunnel sections, will only set you back about $500,000. That wouldn't get you very far in previous RRT games, and I think it's better that way. It used to be more important to find just the right route (anyone else remember running trains through the mountains to California in RRT2?), but now it hardly matters anymore. Terrain gets smoothed, tunnels get dug and bridges get built just like that. You can just smack a track wherever you want one and the game takes care of the rest.

Sixth, there is no campaign. This is hugely disappointing as the campaign in RRT2 was one of the best parts of the game (with the exception of those stupid puzzle ones where all you had to do is route trains). The individual scenarios have a list of objectives, but if you are not looking for them, you won't find them and won't heed them. I don't think you ever get reminded of the objectives and they don't seem to have any real bearing on the game. They are just there. Once you finish a scenario there is no connection to the next one--you just start over. All-in-all, this is pretty disappointing.

So overall, I think it has the makings of a great game...they just didn't finish it. The game itself is so good in the way it looks and the way it plays. It pains me that they kept it so shallow.

PS - One more thing. I forgot to mention the strange fact that the economies are not modified depending on the era. So be prepared to funnel steel to an automobile manufacturer in 1830...and one that is based in a city filled with 20th century skyscrapers.

I don't know what marketing person wrote the description on the box, but their pants are on fire.

The greatest railroad building game of all time is back in a vibrant 3D world

- well, it is in vibrant 3D. Huzzah. If the greatest railroad building game of all time is "back", it's returned battered, bruised, and totally unrecognizable. It's like the bloody, huddled figure of a long-lost friend collasped on your doorstep. You want to cradle it in your arms and scream "Why? Oh, why?" over and over again while shaking your fist at the sky.

delivering exciting multiplayer options,

- exciting = existing; options = option.

in-game customization tools,

- Ha! "Should my locomotive be purple? How about green? So pretty!" That is the extent of these "in-game customization tools". Even your starting city is picked for you!

streamlined interface,

- Streamlined = Lacking in Content. The so-called interface offers an intriguing variety of useless menus and pointless reports. But they're in vibrant 3-D!

and unmatched gameplay,

- Unmatched by what? Pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity. "Sid Meier presents: Sisyphus! In vibrant 3-D! With multiplayer- push a boulder up hill for eternity with a friend! And customizable! Well not really; we pick the hill for you- but if you want to push a more colorful boulder, we can do that!" Actually, Sisyphus did it for eternity, and I played Railroads! for about three hours.

that's easy to learn yet challenging to master.

- Easy to learn... oh my yes. Challenging to master... if you leave your monitor turned off, or if your keyboard is in another room. After my first attempt, I cranked the difficulty all the way up. And then I turned off my monitor and pretended I was playing RT2, or solitaire.

Combining the best of real-world and model railroads,

- That doesn't even make sense. It is a computer game, not tabletop trains, not Amtrak. It is not like tabletop in that you are expected to earn money. It is not like Amtrak in that you are expected to earn money. It is not like tabletop in that you have no way of "driving" the train. It is not like Amtrak in that your network may span two states. This is not a "I'm an engineer!" sim, and it's not a business game.

However, it is like tabletop in that the cities are about four inches apart, and that your train is typically in three stations at once, but I do not know that's the "best" part of model railroads. (It's like Amtrak in that it is highly overpriced.)

Sid Meier's Railroads! puts you in charge of building the greatest rail empire in the nation

- HA! HA! HA! You can run an astonishing Pittsburgh-to-Chicago route; Washington DC-to-New York City is an exciting, seven minute option. The maps are so small that, perhaps, "greatest rail empire in the state" would be possible. This game would be tolerable if you could at least go from NYC to Chicago, or manage a transcontinental line. Nope. The European maps are even worse.

while engaging in all-out corporate warfare against rival tycoons, slick entrepreneuers, and robber barons!

- all-out corporate warfare = all-out corporate lie. There are no bonds, no options, no short selling, no stock issuance, no nothing. There is "stock", and there are ten shares of it. No more, no less. They might as well have done away with that aspect entirely, but then we couldn't claim to have all-out corporate warfare. You can't even use another company's tracks or stations. So all-out corporate warfare is a bald-faced lie.


So disappointing!

SID!!! SID!!!! Did you ever play RRT2 or RRT3 or Locomotion?????

In the media excitement leading up to the release of Railroads!, preview authors often commented on the possibilities stemming from Sid Meier and his reconnection with his old game, Railroad Tycoon. I, too, was ecited. I had spent many hours playing the original, Railroad Tycoon 2, Railroad Tycoon 3, and Locomotion. Locomotion wasn't the game I was expecting, and Poptop stopped developing the Railroad Tycoon genre after releasing the Coast-to-Coast expansion for RRT3. However, after playing Railroads for a few solid hours, I'm must say that Sid has disappointed me.

Poptop released Railroad Tycoon 2 and 3. After they released RRT2, they made some awesome changes to RRT3. The economy was dynamic in that goods would move even without a railroad, if the demand was high enough for a good. That same dynamic isn't in Railroads; you get paid for moving goods (supply and demand does play a role, but only on a global scale). Poptop created a tool by which you could see the amount of the goods on the map and the price difference between different points. Again, nothing like it in Railroads. Poptop allowed players to upgrade all engines of one type into another type with two mouse clicks. Sid has no such tool, so the player must upgrade each engine one at a time. RRT3 (and RRT2) had an interface that meshed with the game (For example, setting routes was handled in one window and it was easy to stay on top of things); Railroads seems clunky and a throwback to the original.

Finally, my biggest complaint is the rail system. In the original game, there were signals that allowed trains to move; the system was simple, and if you double tracked, trains did pretty well. The genre expanded with Transport Tycoon. In TT, there were some serious signal and track work (for examples of what I'm talking about, google Transport Tycoon). RRT2 and RRT3 simplified this and put in place a hierarchy; trains that stood higher in the hierarchy would pass over trains that didn't. Signals weren't used. It wasn't as sophisticated as TT (or Locomotion, TT's successor), but it made gameplay simple, and maps could accommodate massive amounts of trains without the tediousness of trackwork late in the game. With Railroads, the signals are back however, in TT, you could make smart signaling decisions (one way signals, non-reversing trains, and loops). In Railroads, the signals just indicate whether a train can proceed or not (and you can't place them, like you could in the original! They just appear at intersections and at stations). Even then, if a train has stopped at a signal long enough, it will just decide to move forward. The design of the rail network attempts to replicate the original Railroad Tycoon, but the genre has moved on. If a game is going to use signals, then give the player some control over them! If the game isn't going to use signals, use waypoints! Both RRT3 and Transport Tycoon advanced the genre using these tools; Railroads lacks both.

There is more to this list, and I'll add to it as I think of them, but Firaxis and Sid Meier have really disappointed me with this game. It seems that they brushed up the original with new (I admit they are very cool) graphics and sound, but the gameplay hasn't really kept up with the time (Did anyone at Firaxis actually play RRT3 or Locomotion?). If you're thinking about buying the game, I advise you to first download and try the demo.

Railroad Tycoon 4 this is not!

Andrew

I'm not trying to boast or claim to be a Nostradamus of game prediction, but when September rolled around and there was still only one totally meaningless preview video and a handful of screenshots showing at most a train on a track next to some ridiculously off-scale buildings floating around on the net, I knew this was a dumbed down rush job. From what I've read on gaming forums that at least one developer has participated in, this was never meant to be "Railroad Tycoon 4", and to that end at least there's truth in advertising.

Beyond that however, the changes are designed solely to cater to the casual gaming crowd and to drive up sales. I cannot imagine any other reason, since released as is this game was bound to disappoint long-time RRT series fans. The fact that they do not even include a map or scenario editor to extend the pitifully short life of the game's included maps is perhaps the most disappointing. The scale of the maps has already been beaten to death, but those other reviewers are not inaccurately describing their cramped nature. Everything else that was even remotely challenging (track laying, the stock market, chained economies, etc.) in the previous titles is more or less gone or dumbed down to near pointlessness.

This is a game that caters to the Sims crowd, and that is not a bad thing in itself but I fear games like this will become ever more numerous as sales numbers overtake depth and challenge and catering to smaller, more "intense" and educated gamers. If this is the heir to Railroad Tycoon, god forbid what Civ 5 may end up as.

Ok.. I'm writing this mostly because the only full reviews I've found (other than the previous poster on Amazon) have been pre-reviews. FWIW, I bought this at Wal-mart today. So you know where I'm comming from, I'm running a laptop with a 256mb graphics card, and a 2.8ghz PIV w/2GB Ram. (Current NVIDIA drivers). I've played (single player only) for about 5 hours. I've played from Financier (2/4) to Mogul (3/4) difficulty.

I was _really_ looking forward to this game. It's been a few years since RT3 came out. I've played both RT3 and RT2 (they had slightly different economic models) over the past six months or so.

Fundamentally, the game is fun:
-The object is to build your railroad empire.
-There is an economic model that needs to be learned.
-You can own industries, trains, buy out your competition,etc
-This didn't apply to me so much, but if you've wanted to change the look of your trains, you can do that now. Also there is quite a bit of eye candy (things like cows waiting on a platform to get onto cattle cars, or cranes moving fish, etc and so forth).

Differences from previous Railroad Tycoon (RT2+3) games (I understand they're rebranding the franchise, but fundamentally, that's what this is):
-No Bonds! All financing is with equity. This changes things a little since the AI can be aggressive in buying your stock.
-There's no campaign mode. This doesn't really matter I guess, since the campaigns were always independent scenarios strung together.
-The "Job at Retirement" from RT1 and other Sid Meier games from the late 80's/early 90's is back. Note that the transition is abrupt, there is no score breakdown to see where you did bad or good. PopTop did this part better. Actually there is a lot that PopTop did better, such as localization of music... of course there's the bluegrass/pseudo-bluegrass background music, but hearing the British Grenedier's song (if you've played Pirates! it's been stuck in your head) in the same setting as "Chattanoga Choo-Choo) is a little weird.

Unfortunately, there's a lot I don't like here from a gameplay standpoint:
-Restricted zoom-out. The only way to see the whole map is with the minimap.
-Game feels unfinished. The autoinstaller hung my computer and I had to drop the battery to restart and try again. When looking at goods supply and demand, sometimes the good selected would get stuck and then NEVER GO AWAY!. This eventually leads to an un-usable minimap, which wouldn't be a problem except you can't zoom out all that far.
-Success snowballs. When you take over a competitor, you have the option to liquidate him, or merge. In previous RT games you had to deal with your beaten competitor's usurios bond issues he was taking out to fend you off, and his horribly engineered rail system. Based on what I've played so far, first player to buy out another wins, every time.
-Once goals are completed, and monopoply is attained, you still have to play the scenario out to completion unless you want to retire. Note that the scenarios are _LONG_ (year wise, not playtime-wise).

In sum.. Sid Meier's fixed some of the bugs in RT1 (Maxint overflow anyone?) and added some pretty graphics, eliminated the # of trains cap, and otherwise made some changes... but he ignored the _really good work_ done by PopTop in developing his original vision. That worked for Pirates! because no-one had taken that game and improved it substantially (Sea Dogs being more of an RPG), but here nearly an entire genere was built from his work and by ignoring previous work, Mr. Meier has done a diservice to his very loyal fan base.

This game is in such a sorry state that I don't even know where to begin.

First of all, this is not at all what I expected and what I wanted. Sid is known for very complex simulations and I preordered this game only because I saw his name as the game designer. Alas, the game is the most dumbed down train simulation I had ever seen. Looks like Sid jumped in the "easy, fast and easy" bandwagon.

Second, the game is, at best, barely out of beta - a little more useful and less destructive than, say, a computer virus. I experience frequent crashes and the AI often builds ridiculous tracks.

Finally, be aware that the game has one of the worst copy protection systems I had ever seen, which interferes with other applications. For instance, the game won't launch while I run Skype.

Selling a game in such an unfinished state shows lack of ethics and disrespect for the customer. Shame on you, Firaxis and Sid Meier.

This is an extremely dumbed down version of previous Railroad Tycoon games and it's really a disappointment.

Don't expect:

To lay your track precisely, you don't even get an option.
To figure out switchbacks and all the other routing problems.
Lots of trains, there seem to be less than any previous version.
To buy or build industries except in cities.
Station improvements, you can only upgrade a station twice, no other options.
Managers giving you bonuses.
Any in-depth finance: No bonds. No short selling. No option buying.
In-depth control of difficulty levels - there are four levels, no tinkering.
And a ton of other fun features.

Do expect:

A very fast and easy game.
Only 8 (EIGHT) single player maps/scenarios and about the same for multiplayer.
No replay value.
The track is simple to lay (which isn't a good thing).
The trains are very easy to route/consist (which isn't a good thing).

I probably played Railroad Tycoon 2 for a couple of hundred hours and really enjoyed the complexity and replayability of the campaigns. Can you do it just a little better next time, or do it all electric, etc.? But none of that is here in this game, I expect I'll get less than 40 hours out of it. At least that's more than I got out of Railroad Tycoon 3, I guess.

A huge disappointment. Be sure to play the demo first if you're remotely interested. Or wait for it to hit the bargain bin, it'll be there in a few weeks.

Being a long time Railroad Tycoon fan, I had high hopes for this one. I figure if Sid Meier is going to wallpaper his name all over the package it must be something special.

For fans of the RR Tycoon series I can sum it up real easy for you. They spent all their time rebuilding and redesigning the track building feature in this game and they dumbed down everything else so the attention deficit 12yr olds can play it.

All the great economic model detail from Tycoon 3 was tossed out the window or pretty much ignored and they pushed for simplification. No longer are you able to position buildings within towns, they just sorta sprout up like weeds as you sprinkle magic supply & demand fertilizer on em.

The Pros:
* Track Building system is really a HUGE improvement over the Tycoon series
* Nice graphics, bright & colorful, exagerated but not cartooney, a nice balance
* Animations at various supply stations are fun to watch (the cattle loading, the coal chutes, etc)
* It plays a little faster than the RRT games... you can finish a game inside of an hour
* the land conforms to the track as you lay it, allowing for appropriate inclines

The Cons:
* the land maybe conforms too much to the track as you lay it
* They sorta ruin the economic system from RRT3, it feels too simplistic
* Unable to analyze supply & demand trade routes
* The business strategy side of the game is inferior to RRT3
* No cabooses? ...now that's just odd!
* Individual missions feel disjointed, no real feeling of accomplishment upon completion
* Simplified game style promotes track laying sprint gameplay
* Cannot lay disconnected track from your main line

Summary:

Overall, if you're totally new to the overhead train management genre of gaming and you're looking for a train game that is more in-step with a scale-hobbyist toy train style game. You'll no doubt enjoy this game. It also makes for a nice intro to train mgmnt strategy games and is suitable in complexity for the 10-15yr old.

If you're a longtime RRT fan and was hoping for an advancement of the RRT3 series; I'm afraid you'll feel as though you've taken 1 step forward (track building) and 2 steps back (dumbed down strategy).

The most amazing part of the game is without a doubt it's track building. You always lay single track, but if you lay single track next to an existing track, it snaps perfectly to the other track allowing you to build these great multi-track lines 3-4-5-6 sets of rails, and adding track switches between the connected lines is perfectly executed. There's absolutely zero frustration in trying to make one track tie into another, which has always been a bit of a frustration in the RRT series. At stations you do have to limit your track pairing down to 3, but 3 is plenty for a station stop.

I believe the perfect RRT game would basically take RRT3 and add to it the track building features of SM Railroads. And perhaps allow the users a little more control over managing the switches and orchestrating train movement. If the player wants to play Gomez Adams and smash trains together in colossal mid-bridge explosions, why not let em?

If Sid Meier should choose to release a sequel to this one with some of the detail of RRT3 he'd have a blockbuster to truly be proud of. ...and if you're gonna build a table-top HO scale style game, you gotta have cabooses!

I heard about Railroads and preordered it based on two things, one I was lead to believe by the reviews and forums that this was essentially Railroad Tycoon updated, and two Sid Meir had never let me down. I like all Sid Meir games, except this one. This game pales when compared to Railroad Tycoon, or RRT II. I don't like RRT III either but Sid's name wasn't on that one. I started playing RRT around 1990 on a DOS machine. I was hoping that all the game play would be back. Yes RRT was a complex game, but this game has been dumbed down so far that it's not even fun. Laying track exactly where you want it is a pain now. Pesky train switching yards, hotels, post offices, don't worry about it, all taken care of for you! The maps seem overly condensed and gives the impression that your playing in a small space compared to the first game. I'm boxing this back up and hoping to find a suc.....errr buyer on ebay. Keep your DOS version if you still have it.

Have you ever had a game that you just like to play even though it is unfinished and not so complex? Well this is one of them.
This is not a simulation . This is not RRT2. This is a cute toy train set that you set up with its routes and engine. The Sid group seems to want a different audience with this game since it is quick to start and quick to finish, you make lots of money and fast, and you can beat the ai by the end of the scenario for the icing on the cake.
SMR! looks great but you'll need at least the recommended requirements. I used a 2.4Ghz Pentium4, 256Mb Nvidia 6800GT, but the 512MB memory I think is the culprit for the game being extremely slow with less than 1/2 the graphic goodies in the game. Anti-aliasing and shaders off, trees off, and still laaaaging at the lowest possible resolution - 1024x768.
Replay-ability depends - it is simple in execution, aimed to make you a winner so you feel good about buying out your competitor tycoons. I play it a lot cause I love little trains going about their business but it is not too challenging.
The auctions, industries, and stock market - well maybe there is a lot to do with that and I have missed the point but I do nothing with all that. I just make sure my trains supply the towns with a variety of goods so that the towns become large cash cows and then save cash to buy out the competitors. So it seems that there is no need to bother with anything else.
The train engines are many but basically all you get is more speed as the years go by and they cost more. You don't have to upgrade too often. I had trains run for over 100 years and things were smooth and profitable. And they 'll never crash or run out of anything they need.
They get to where you want them to go quite nicely with few exceptions where they won't start from the track you'd like. You need to plan the tracks to get everything working well and that is the brain teaser and fun part if you choose the "hard track layout" but sometimes they will loop through the wrong track and you have no choice in that. The AI lays out its own tracks like the real thing - it is nice to look at those and get some tips too.
Bugs - Sometimes trains disappear and reappear back where they came from but it is rare. Sometimes you see things flying through the screen, like a piece of a train or smoke launch like a cannon ball and again this is rare and funny; definitely a bug though. Oh, and this happens even after I upgraded my nvidia drivers.
Lastly it crashes to the desktop; happened about 6 times in roughly 20 hours of play and I think much has to do with using the page file for memory cause I only have 512MB. So save often.
Despite all this I still recommend it for I would think at least a 25% discount off it's original price. I'll keep my full price copy cause despite it's flaws I still enjoy it albeit with a lot of patience.
I know I have not said much about the fun of the game and it is not fair cause I like playing it but really the only enjoyable thing is to lay down the track and watch as everything works like a clock but not more than that. For many this will get old quick but it looks real nice with a cartoonish colorful look that keeps you going at it.
I would not expect it to carry the Sid Meier name. I am a fan of his Civilization series and if I were him I would not have let it be released; forget about putting my name on it. It definitely is close to being a polished game and it could be made more engaging but as is it is not finished. The first patch is out already and hopefully they'll patch, patch, patch, until it's done.