0/5, the game had potential but often felt like taking me for a complete fool. It left me head shaking. - Automatic freight choosing is really boring and stupid. - Awekward Interface. Often you need to move the mouse over the whole screen and click many times. This limits the playing speed very badly. - The mass of trains you need is ridiculous. That is even worse because there is no possibility to sort or group them. Calling one train a 'line' is stupid. - Using Signals feels very tedious and needless, also because there are no real crossings. - Why is there sand and oil? It has no effect. - Why are there shares when there is no dividend? Why do you have to buy 100% to merge? Shares don't work that way. - Why are there higher tier products? There is no point in making them. Every transport and factory gets you the same revenue. - Using personell is useless and extremely tedious, just as the resarch tree. - Weather effects are annoying and can not be switched off. The bright and dark from the clouds is very uncomfortable. Turning them off should be minimum. - Some of the scenarios goals are very stupid and feel like very bad level design. - Too much DLCs, too costly. - Trains behaviour and look is very uncool. Acceleration is stupidly fast and trains look like toys. There is no massiveness of real steam trains. I wonder if the developers ever saw one for real. - The first person camera while driving a train is very strangely attached and has limited looking angle. You can't even look at the train. Its a game about TRAINS, so, let me see the TRAIN. Feels very disappointing. - Playing with AI is absolutly no fun. Tracks can't intersect with theirs and the comments are very, very annoying. - Laying tracks can be very cumbersome at times, the new track bends very strangely. - Your built rail network looks like a mess. + Music is good. For me, Railroad Tycoon 2 is the better game in every single point, from graphics to interface to gameplay to campaign.
The game itself is actually very fun, but... After beating the normal endboss with every perk the real game begins: 5-relic runs. To survive this mode you need stupendous reflexes, along with so much luck with the drops. Also, there is time pressure, not to speak of loosing all your blessings before encountering the endboss. Beating the final final boss turns nearly impossible. Or even reaching it. In fact, don't even think about reaching the final zone. And because getting there is so, so difficult you can't even train that true endboss. So you need to play over and over and over again. And while playing the game for hundreds of hours for even beating it once, i realized how unbalanced it really is. Some of the weapons are completly useless, as are the perks. I don't know why there are explosion weapons in the game, there's no point in using them, except you want to kill yourself. Also, elemental damage seems useless. It's mostly damage over time, but you need the enemies to die very quickly, so it can't even trigger once. Only some particular items are actually useful, you just need the luck to drop them. The minibosses also vary a lot in difficulty, you need luck with them as well. DLC: It is kind of fun, but very unbalanced, as the main game. To proceed or beat the arena you need one of the game breaking combos. And then it gets a stupid mess. I like to play a game to completion, but this frustrated me after hundreds of hours trying and trying. A game should be fun, I don't mind if its hard and challenging, but this one is so difficult that you have to be a robot to beat it to completion.
