This game is beautiful! Each mission will pose a specific challenge, and one inspired by history, no less. One time you are tasked with crossing mountainous terrain with trains that lack traction. Another time it's a bendy river valley and high speed trains that can't do sharp turns. Or massively subsidized air travel. Or just crossing a vast distance, or connecting a complicated network of businesses and people. Transport Fever is beautiful when you are figuring out these systems. I greatly appreciate the historical background, and the realistic scale of these missions, which no other game seems to be able to pull off quite as well. I just wish its UI was less clunky and the graphics a bit nicer.
I like to lay tracks. I like the challenge of snaking them through difficult terrain, and figuring out the most effective routes. And Railroad Empire has the best track-laying tools in the industry. It is pure genius: It starts just like Sid Meiers Railroads!, where you build smooth curves from point to point. But instead of buying the tracks the moment you click, Railroad Empire will let you tweak long stretches of track after you have layed them out initially. Only once you are satisfied, you click buy and it buys the whole thing. It is genius! But, there are just no interesting obstacles to lay your track around. Every once in a while there is a mountain range to build around, or a river to cross, but money is so cheap in this game, all the great building tools are wasted and it is almost always easier to just build a giant tunnel or bridge. That is this game in a nutshell. Don't get me wrong, I had a great time with the game. It has dozens of interesting, interlocking systems, and it is a joy to figure out a good network. But at the end of the day, it somehow doesn't live up to that promise. The tools are there to optimize and fine-tune everything, but apparently that's just not the game Railroad Empire wants to be. Instead, it wants you to be a Tycoon, who plops down new track instead of optimizing existing ones. There is a constant mad rush to meet the next mission, and never enough time to fix old problems. So I find myself torn between these two goals: The building game of trying to design the perfect network, and the tycoon game of outmaneuvering your opponents, and expanding to conquer the world. Both are in there, somewhere, if you can find them.
Divine divinity is not Diablo. It is not "frustration free gaming". But it has this huge world to explore and really lets you play your way. Of course, it also won't stop you from dying your way, but that is just part of the exploration of the world. It may not be as structured or streamlined as Diablo. But it offers something like freedom. It took a while, but after spending some hours with Divine Divinity it really grew on me. And it is LONG! I spent something like fifty hours with this game and thought to be near the end, when suddenly I entered the second map that was just as vast and interesting as the first one. Really, gotta love it!
