Railway Empire Complete Collection

This take some practice to get used to, especially with signalling. After having played Transport Fever 2, I had to rethink my approach to signalling with Railway Empire. You have to be very specific, or you will make a complete mess of things and have all sorts of problems on your rail network. The tutorial missions in the campaign, leave a lot of room for error and don't exactly explain things clearly, so it becomes a little frustrating, with a LOT of trial and error... Initially at least. I checked a few very helpful Youtube guides and things started to make much more sense. Once I'd discovered why things weren't working as intended and expected (Transport Fever 2 signalling layout is easy by comparison), then the game became much more enjoyable. With all that in-mind, if you're considering buying this, expect a few teething troubles when you start-out and seek help if you need it, that's half the battle won, the rest falls into place quite easily after that ;-). Overall, a very enjoyable sim/game and worth investing the extra time you will likely need to get to grips with it.

Lies, it is not the complete DLC included here. Please take more responsibility for accurate information. Essentially, I see this as a marketting lie. lies lies lies.

See my full review under Standard Game. The bad issues have NOT all been fixed. Latest version 1.14.1-27369, downloaded March 13, 2022. You get the very beautiful scenery + trains + music shown in advertising [worth the 2 stars] BUT there are horrible Cartoon Characters to deal with through the whole game. Economic model is poor. Train Load management is very poor. The AI characters still cheat with simple track. Maybe more appealing for kids. It's fun to ride on a train. Not a good Railroad management game.

Because of the moving goal posts of updated software (I hope), I don't think it is fair to review games like Railway Empire Complete Collection without mentioning the operating system it's running on and the version of the game. I play this on Linuxmint 20 Cinnamon 64-bit and am using the current version available to me as 12/14/2020 when I posted this, which is 1.13.0.25925. I really like the game and hope it will improve over time. But that being said, I love trains and there is little options for train games on Linux operating systems. That's the only reason it got two stars rather than one. For what I got even at 25% off full retail, it was too much money for the current state of the software. I say this because the game is utterly full of bugs, and the tutorials and documentation is very lacking. Shame on GOG for not displaying this as in development. That's a real disservice to it's customers. Another gripe is that this is a bundle of the base game with all the DLC add ons, rather than one file for the whole game. When it updates I will have to download and install nine files. You are absolutely and pretty much required to go to youtube and other web sites to learn how to use signals, stations, and other aspects of the game that the in game "Tutorials" and "Tips and Hints" section don’t tell you about. Signals do indeed work when you understand how to use them in conjunction with stations and assigning station tracks for each train, or use stations with signaling control. I've never used it with the signaling turned off as I like it because it is realistic. GOG is limiting me on text amount, so instead of hearing what I like about it, you get a partial bug list: Game freezes when deleting a saved game. Headhunter still gets employee on fail. Sometimes new goals in scenarios don't come up when you've completed the current ones. Sometimes goals can't be completed because they require interaction with territories that are blocked off. Don't recommend.

To start with the positives: the graphic is stunning, the locomotives are modelled beautiful and for the first tim you can lay your tracks carving troug the terrain. My negatives is that the timeperiod is stemtrains only, the resources on the maps are useless beccause no city needs them and the placement of signals are troublesome. But to summarize: I like the game and I'm having lots og fun playing it.