Locomotion, Chris Sawyer's

I bought this game back in 2004. I loved it then and I still love it today. A lot of people are comparing locomotion with Transport Tycoon, and like many other people I also played Transport Tycoon in the early years. When Locomotion came out, I dropped out of the Transport Tycoon era and started on this one. I think it's so much better for a number of reasons: I think Locomotion looks more realistic and the graphics have improved when compared to Transport Tycoon. Also the trains and vehicles look way better then in the previous game, and so does the tracks for the trains (I always hated the strange diagonal turns in Transport Tycoon)...but track-laying was better in Transport Tycoon (a click on the mouse for every piece of track in Locomotion). Only two points that really disappointed me. The first being the limits of the game, the small maps, and the limits for choosing vehicles and industries. The other one, the terrible AI for the game !! When I discovered the Transport Tycoon forums in 2006, a new world opened up for me...I found a lot of new downloads for the game, like new trains, road-vehicles, plains and ships. I also found great scenarios from great designers who spend hours of work for creating those new scenarios. I found new stations, city-buildings and new industries that could be used for the game. The most brilliant of all was the long station patch wich could be used to create much greater and better looking stations. There were absolutly great designers there who made the game even more addictive ! It all made me start to work on my own mods for the game as well wich are still downloaded today, like the Valuables and Foodmod for the game. Sometimes I'm still working on some new things, but most of all, it kept me playing and still keeps me playing this game today ! I would recommend this oldie for all tycoon-fans even after ten years, and with the new downloads that came out in that decennia it still holds it ground, even after 10 years !!

I played this for 5 minutes then gave up, the UI is so clunky and makes it impossible to give orders easily to your vehicles. I just can't believe how awful it is, its a shame because the potential is there but without being able to easily order multiple vehicles and give them orders its just a real pain. Play OTTD instead!

I remember when this came out, and for the price, a game that looked very similar to, but somehow worse than SimCity 3000 five years later coupled with a few underwhelming reviews kept me away. Fast forward a decade and a half and its' for sale on GoG, so I thought, "why not?" I would pick it up, force myself to play for an hour, get bored and then leave. Over and over. The tutorials aren't super useful. It wasn't until my last game session when I forced myself to play for three hours that I realized just how little there is to do in this game. It was also when I realized just how finnicky and annoying everything is. Laying track and roads is mind-numbing. Fiddling with station catchment areas is just ridiculous. The mini-map is almost worthless. And the hideous graphics where everything looks the same are also a hindrance. Oh, and that awful soundtrack... I can finally say that after having put a few hours into, it's just not really worth playing. This is someone coming in from Railroad Tycoon and many, many citybuilders and all this game does is make me want to play them. It's just missing...the "fun" feeling that a good sim gives you. It feels more like clicking tile-based work with some anxiety about whether or not your catchment is good enough...The A.I. weren't too interesting either. They seemed to just connect to all the same stuff as you, but because of catchments, everyone had plenty of resources to haul...I looked all over the internet to see if perhaps there were some guides offering an understanding of the game at the mathematical level such as with SimCity. I was curious what tiles spawn what resources at what rates and where the best place to put stations is. I was curious abotu the rate of growth of towns with deliveries...I wanted to know something about how this game worked so I could at least try to be efficient at it. But nope. Most of the guides were "build buses and then trains lol." Maybe some things are just better off remaining a mystery.

AN EPIC game that I've been playing since i was 10 and now i'm 16 and there are many mods for this game you just have to find the right sight for them!!!

The good: Its cheap, and its a fun game. The bad: Nothing, buy this game if you like buiding stuff.