Railway Empire

The greatest fault I see is a lack of real world routing for the comodities. Resources going from station to station from one end of the map to the other.

Only playing this game will you discover there are Cartoon Characters you must deal with! Each has personality quirks, including your train crew and office personnel who may not get along with each other! Why? We see childish Spies, Bandits, Saboteurs, more like a Carmen Sandiego game! All negative stereotypes that pop up to taunt you and to bid against you in Auctions. The very Beautiful scenery + trains + music shown in advertising [worth the 2 stars] does NOT mix well with Cartoon Characters! Bad programming still exists! If you hire a Professor, he GIVES you money, and REMOVES research points! Not the reverse! There is Poor Managing of trains and loads. You must go to Train Line setup to see details of your Load orders. The only way out is "Make Change" which often reverts to default settings! Every Train, Every Load! Poor demand info is easily misleading. Signaling is very confusing to set up. The AI characters still cheat and do NOT have to build double track or signals as their trains magically pass through each other! Soon they will surpass your system in track miles and cities covered! The Economic model is poor. A city may say it only uses 0.2 car loads of a good per month. Why build a spur to get wood or cattle if you can sell less than 1 load per month? They WILL buy many loads of goods but then suddenly NOT buy anymore because they stockpiled maybe 20 carloads! Can you wait till they use 0.2 a month before buying more? Ridiculous. They won't offer to sell these goods for you to transport to other cities. Wacky logic. Real Railroads run on ORDERS for goods to transport, not by picking up random stuff and trying to find where to sell them! Was this supposed to be a detailed railroad simulation or a simplified game? Was this to be a realistic historical game or a comical interaction game? Was this to appeal to adults or to kids under 18? Sadly, they put BOTH in a mixed bag! Not recommended if you want railroad management! Railroad Tycoon 1990 was better!

I got this a year ago, and played some of the campaign. It's fairly tough game, you get a notice that you lost, and then the game exits whatever you playing. Boy isn't that fun. I did learn a few tricks of the trade. One being you don't have a lot of time to do what the game wants. I give this game one star only because you have to, to post a review. If you are thinking the game has a tutorial, and/or a manual, you would be wrong. The developers believe anyone who buys the game automatically knows everything about the game. No need for documentation letting you know what the keyboard commands are, or how anything in the game works. When I played before I had to go online, and search the internet to find out everything. That is a very scummy way to sell a game. Sad to say it's still that way. This a game that was developed by people who hate their customers. I was thinking about playing again, but I am not going "work" to find out how to do the simplest things. No, I will just uninstall this garbage. It's a total waste of money and time.

Game is full of icons, but no tooltip at all to remaind you what the icon does. To place a signal, left click. BUT if you wanted a one direction signal, it was SHIFT+left click. Change signal direction? SHIFT+middle button, obviously. And to delete : CONTROL+left click. Was it so difficult to place icons to interract with the selected item? Was it difficult to create a popup in order to select the signal type? The same to place a station : who decided to use SHIFT+mouse roll to rotate the station? And with CONTROL to sloww down the rotation? Who made the design of this game? Was it really designed in 21th century? Look at games all around you, namely on smartphones ! Tutorial is impossible to follow without watching youtube videos, it's a shame ! It would be easy to place the camera to show where you'll have to act. It would be easy to highlight the position where the tutorial wants you to place the item. I've been stucked ten times because I was not on the good place, or because it was not exactly the place tutoorial expected to see elements.

Great graphics, but expect to shell out several hundred $ for an adequate video card. The recommended GTX 680 costs $773 for example. Sadly the game play is almost identical to the old Transport Tycoon Deluxe, or the free open source openTTD. Only the graphics is better. I echo the comment about not being able to move the map window with the mouse, I found this extremely awkward. It could be a nice game if some of these issues were fixed, as it is I have returned it!