Destructive Incorporated

I was thrilled when I saw Firaxis bringing out a new edition of one of my favorite Sid Meier's classics, 'Railroads!' Of course Railroad Tycoon doesn't quite stack up to the Civilization series, but it still entertained me for hours upon hours. First thing I did was look for some reviews of Railroads!, and found them quite lacking, which surprised me. So, trusting Sid wouldn't do me wrong, I went and bought Railroads! thinking I'd have a game to enjoy for some time to come.

one of the many rival tycoons
First thing I did was install on my Compaq R3000z laptop (AMD 3000+, 1GB ram, Nvidia GO 440 w/ 64mb on board ram). I figured a business trip with lots of downtime was perfect to get some gaming in. Too bad Railroads! doesn't think my laptop is powerful enough for the game to let me even try to play it, after it let me install! No options to lower video settings and no messages letting me know what part of my system wasn't fast enough (I assumed my video card, but it meets the required 64MB card on the side of the box). Bummer, no gaming for me for a couple days.

After a good rest to clear up jet-lag, I went ahead and installed the game on my primary system (dual Opteron 246's, 2GB ram, 6600GT). It installation was a snap, just as with the laptop. This time the game loads, and after an entertaining opening sequence picturing a youth playing with model trains growing older as his model gets more and more complex, until it finally shows the models turn into a full scale railroad. I started a single player game immediately, figuring I'd be able to pick it up. Maybe the tutorial wouldn't have been a bad idea, but after a half hour I understood what I was doing pretty well. Problem is, right after I started getting up to speed on the routing and understanding all the buttons, my system froze up. Not just an inconvenient crash of the game, but my whole system completely froze. Frustrated, I rebooted and started up a new game. This time I managed to play for about 45 minutes before the same thing occurred. My whole system locked up again. Now, more angry, I reboot again. This time I strip my system of all extra programs, thinking maybe something was conflicting with the game and causing the crash. This time the game lasts about 10 whole minutes before another full system lockup. Because I was unable to see any one particular thing I was doing in the game that was causing the crashes, I went ahead and started surfing for an answer. Just as when I was looking for reviews, I found very few threads about the game, but the one that I did find right off doesn't make things look good for Railroads! It seems that lots of people are having frequent crashing, and possibly for many different reasons.

At this point, angry that I even wasted money on the game and wondering how the game made store shelves with so many issues, I decided that I would give the game one more go on another system. I installed the game on another gaming rig my roommate had laying around (E6300 Core Duo, 1GB ram, 6600GT). Another painless install, and I was playing in no time. This time I was able to get some solid game time in without a crash, allowing a review more on the gaming side of Railroads!

Again, I skipped the tutorial, which was an easy transition into the game this time since I'd gotten in about 1.5hours of game time in between lockups. The game interface is easy to learn and navigate, but offers massive information in 'sub-pages'. If you play Civilization, you will be at home with Railroads! interface. Track building is easy, and while routing trains takes some time to get efficient at it is an intuitive and quick process as well. The trains keep track of all sorts of efficiency measurements, including how much profit the train has brought in (gross - costs/maintenance) and % time spent waiting for a track to be clear of another train. There are plenty of other things to keep track of and save up money for as well, such as buying patents for train upgrades to keep them away from your competition and lower your costs, and buying industries in cities both you and your competition bring goods to. Don't forget to upgrade your train stations in busy cities either!

The game play has proved to be as entertaining as it is consuming, just like most of Sid Meier's titles. That doesn't leave it without faults, other than the freezing issues and not playing on a system that meets the specs.

One of the most annoying problems I have come across is the game slowing down. While the game is never as fast or smooth as I would expect from a modern game, it gets sluggish before you have a chance to even get that far into it, and gets downright pathetically slow after just a couple of hours into a game. It was nearly un-playable after 2 hours, it takes 20-30 seconds to even start the process to lay more track. Scrolling around the screen is dreadful, it takes 3-10 seconds per 'jump' of 1/5 of the screen width in any direction. Clicking on the mini map may take it 30 seconds to move you. For reference, 30 seconds is months of game time. Then again, there is a pause button. Thing with the pause button is it seems to not only pause the trains/time, but it seems to make the lag at least twice as bad! You basically cant achieve anything when the game is paused once you get deeper into the game. Pause is crucial to my play style too, I often find that I don't build fast enough to keep up with game time unless I use pause now and then and go on mass-building exoduses.

Another more minor annoyance is the pre-set options when starting a scenario. I'm not entirely sure why I would want to play a game (especially long term, if it was possible) without competition! I fail to see why default is 0 AI players. I can't see a game being 'fun' past about the first hour and a half without any competition. I've yet to play enough to see if they forgot any other 'defaults' that should be set differently. Once I realized I was playing a 'dud' game the first time around, I started up a new game and found that the AI wasn't all that impressive, at least in my first attempt. The computer managed to make the craziest, most complex set of bridges winding back and forth over one another for no apparent reason (aside from waisting all of it's money), and had ONE train going between many stops, where it should have been using more like 7-8 trains!

All in all, I plan to give the game a good bit more play time, and wait out a patch to see if it doesn't solve many of the issues the game faces. I'm quite inclined to agree with many of the forum comments that the game is still in a BETA stage at best. I hope they aren't just hosing fans with a game full of holes that they don't intend to fix, relying purely on selling the game with their usually good reputation.

With the current state of the game I would give it a 4 out of 10, but if things are fixed up I think the game will be right up there at 8 or 9 out of 10.