Sid Meier’s Railroads!
More family friendly than Ozzy’s crazy train.
Tags: Sid Meier¹s Railroads! Categories: PC Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Tracy Erickson on Feb 22nd, 2007
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Sid Meier¹s Railroads! (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Simulation | No | ||
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Remaking classic games has been a trend in the industry for a number of years now, but it has largely been relegated to the console space. Sid Meier’s Railroads! is among a handful of PC titles reinventing nostalgic games with a fresh presentation and contemporary gameplay. While it isn’t any surprising that yet another Sid Meier game offers up great gameplay, it is a little unexpected that Railroads! doesn’t possess the level of polish we’ve come to expect of his games. Even so, Sid Meier’s Railroads! is a highly enjoyable game that overcomes its shortcomings with pure imaginative fun.
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Continuing the legacy of the original Railroad Tycoon game released way back in 1990, Railroads! tasks you with creating a rail empire. The robust single player campaign features 15 distinct scenarios, each with several increasingly difficult objectives, as well as a free form Train Table mode. Multiplayer support for up to four players is offered both via LAN and online. The objective-based scenarios are good fun, but the best gameplay comes from Train Table skirmishes against the computer or multiplayer matches. Like most Sid Meier games, the value of Railroads! really depends on your imagination and how you toy with its the free form gameplay.
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As a captain of industry, your goal is to raise a locomotive empire and eliminate the competition. To do this you’ll need to set up supply lines between key resources and the people who need them; heretofore, you’ll construct supply depots and connect them to cities by laying down track. Other than a few supporting elements, much of your time playing Railroads! will be building a rail network. While this may seem awfully basic, it provides for an enormous amount of fun. Creating an intricate network of tracks connecting cities of all sizes harkens back to days spent in the sandbox making imaginary train tracks in the sand.
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Anyone should be able to jump right into the game and start laying down a rail network—interface is remarkably sleek, as are the controls. Laying track is as easy as clicking on a starting point, moving the mouse along the desired line, and the clicking at the end point. Turns are automatically factored into the track as you lay it, as are bridges and tunnels; however, you’ll spend more for these special structures, as well as building on difficult terrain. Information regarding resource demands, population, etc. is shown above each city, making it effortless to survey the map.
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Railroads! is less a simulation of the rail industry and more a simple interactive model of supply and demand. While some of the easier scenarios will task you with trite objectives such as connecting two cities by means of a passenger line, the bulk of the game rests in delivering goods to meet consumer demand. Doing this enables your company to grow. As you gain capital, you can purchase patents to new technologies that will further your corporate expansion; even more, you can buy shares of your competitors in the hopes of eventually buying them out. Technologies are particularly pertinent to multiplayer where getting an advantage over your opponents could mean the difference between victory and defeat. Stocks are less of a factor in multiplayer matches, but are an ideal way of taking out competitors in single player games.
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Meeting the system requirements won’t quite be enough to run Railroads! smoothly; instead, you’ll need to approach the recommended configuration if you want stability. Regular drops in the framerate and occasional freezing can be expected on lower-end machines. More robust hardware may allow you to tweak the graphical settings, but you’ll still see minor visual issues such as trains flickering, tracks mingling in unusual ways, and other oddities. This isn’t to say that Railroads! isn’t attractive; on the contrary, the game is colorful and brimming with activity. Given the resources needed to run the game though, it’s a little disappointing the game doesn’t run smoother or at least polish off the minute graphical shortcomings.
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The technical shortcomings of Sid Meier’s Railroads! might be enough to ward off some, but if you’re willing to brave minor graphical flaws you’ll be rewarded with good gameplay. While polish is not totally apparent in the presentation, it certainly shines on the open-ended economic simulation gameplay. Even if you’ve never played the original Railroad Tycoon, there’s a lot of fun to be had with Sid Meier’s Railroads!
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ Easy to jump into and play + Great economic elements + Good single player and multiplayer options |
8.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
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- Less than stellar technical performance - Minor graphical glitches |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| A lack of polish on the presentation mars an otherwise great experience in Sid Meier’s Railroads! Running the game smoothly without a good system is going to be hard, but at least you’ll be treated to some imaginative gameplay. | |
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Tags: Sid Meier¹s Railroads!
Posted by Tracy Erickson on Feb 22nd, 2007 and is filed under PC Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
