Railroad Tycoon 2 Platinum

Not really a 3 star review but a neutral review. Game runs well on a modern OS and I found the interface easy to understand. However, getting dropped into this was a little difficult as there is only a half-hearted tutorial, after which I still had no idea how to do basically anything in this game. I believe because with the original game, you would have had to learn everything from a manual booklet included with the game. It seems to work well as a classic economic simulation game, but doesn't explain much through the game itself.

The game seems like it would be engrossing. However, it doesn't provide you with enough information on how to make money. I read the entire manual, but no matter what option I tried on the very first route, I lost money quickly and had to restart the game. The YouTube videos didn't help much.

It's good game for advice gamers.

Unlike most other games on gog this one works

I also remembered it fondly from the linux port, but time seems to have moved on and it is no longer competetive, therefore I cannot recommend it. Free-to-play games such as Simutrans and OpenTTD are much better at everything but company management, and who is playing it, because you can buy stocks? The game lacks important features, bridges are only for crossing water, terrain cannot be adjusted, there are no tunnels. Railways stations can only have 2 tracks, making the game extremely frustrating after building a few lines. Connecting the same industry to more than one station also just creates behavior that can be considered thoughtless programming. Add this to train cars that can be created out of thin air (transporting milk from A to B and coal from B to A without ever bringing the empty cars back), lack of signals, only 3 levels for train priority, basically no way to let trains wait for an exact ammount of goods (either "dont care"/"at least half filled"/"completely filled"), only a single kind of track, either single track, double track, electrified, not electrified. The industries are also lackluster, most often supply and demand of the raw materials is not balanced; there is no limit to the raw materials that can be brought to a single industry (the price will be lowered though). Also setting a train schedule with waypoints to avoid bottlenecks is basically impossible (no zoom, station symbols block the view), laying tracks automatically only chooses the direct paths (most likely over mountain tops). Economics are also very unclear. I still do not know, if my stations cost me any upkeep (hello station with a sanding tower in the middle of nowhere). I also do not know how train fuel costs are being calculated. There are probably more annoyances to add -> just play Simutrans or OpenTTD