Posted on: July 21, 2022
neclink28
Games: 32 Reviews: 15
IG2's charming but clunky predecessor
Disclaimer: played way more of the base game rather than Gold, so that’s mostly what I’ll be referring to. Pros: - Nice isometric presentation, cheesy mid-90s soundtrack - Fond childhood memories - Limited in scope and complexity, easy to learn, ~2h for each mission - Plenty of content with goals to work towards to. Three campaigns (easy, medium, hard) and about 30 standalone missions. There’s also the sandbox scenarios, of course - Excellent mental exercise since you’ll have to memorize every aspect of your company. Game does a poor job of providing you with data that’s actually relevant to parts of as opposed to the entire organization - The satisfaction when your plan(s) come together at the end of a mission. Tons of vehicles buzzing about like clockwork for that model railway feeling Cons: - Missions tend not to be relaxing at all. Very ambitious goals, rapid progression of time, the player’s inability to do much of anything while the game’s paused, little margin for error - Pathfinding is atrocious. Shared railway lines are usually just tempting fate (insufficient lookahead for reserving paths, no signals or waypoints, no alerts by the game in case anything goes wrong) and gridlocks are frequent because there can be only one truck (or civilian car!) in an intersection at any given time - No shared vehicles orders - Best not to switch vehicles to some other line by giving them a new set of orders. Can and will lead to game-breaking bugs (stuck vehicles, inaccessible terminals without obvious cause) - Feels as if the UI is fighting you at every step of the way. Terraforming, building and vehicle selection… everything’s clunky - Terminal placement is a consistent headache because of very limited capacity, too-close restrictions and the need to work around catchment areas. Everything but the simplest of industries needs multiple terminals for delivery and pickups I’d probably recommend IG2 instead. Same game mechanics but much, much more polished and refined.
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