"A disappointing return"

Muggins here has a particular soft spot for strategy games and steam trains. There's nothing like plotting an assault with meticulous planning using hotkeys and waypoints to end an hour-long seige in battle, and modern trains just don't have the charisma, the personality of their ancestors. Yes, call me an anorak if you wish, but I defy he who doesn't want to be covered in soot during a 3 hour train journey. It's part of the experience when dealing with big, mighty, dirty, oily, manly machines that hiss, fart and grunt their way around. You can feel every turn of the wheels as it storms down the track thanks to nothing more than coal burning in its furnace to heat water in the tank, which then produces steam to drive pistons that in turn move gigantic wheels along tracks. It's sexual chemistry, I'm telling you.

So what the hell was Sid Meier thinking about re-making his Railroad Tycoon game in such a simple manner? Playing this title is like thinking of Margaret Thatcher when trying to become excited, everything just ceases to be and you get a weird taste in the back of your mouth. It has to be one of the rare moments in which the inventor of a franchise comes back and completely ruins the very series that a 3rd party made a household name.

The aim of Sid Meier's Railroads is, unsurprisingly, to be the dominant railway company on the map. To achieve this, you must link towns together through the magic of railways and assign locomotives to race between them, hauling goods and passengers along the way. You can make things more complex by picking up raw materials and crops from the very source, transporting them to a town with the appropriate manufacturer, and then to a settlement that demands the commodity. Where the business module comes into play is you must work out whether it is cost effective to run a line to, say, a vineyard and have a steam engine drag the goods back to civilisation to turn them into wine. Supplying goods to each town makes money which offsets the running costs of your line and leads to purchasing the newest locomotives and expanding your network. Simple.

Way too simple.

Find a crop or raw material, ship it to town, collect the cash. That's the gameplay. There's no global economy that affects the pricing of each good, nor the availability or demand. It used to feel like a real kick in the teeth in the two previous games, when you'd finally be able to fund a track to a steel mine, only to hear three months later than cheap imports from abroad have made the market fall flat; but going back now it feels like a relief. You can boost your coffers further by buying businesses in each town, and this is an area that Sid Meier has drastically improved on his return; come to think of, it's perhaps the only good thing that Railroads has going for it. Instead of buying a business outright, you instead bid for it up against all your rivals. Everytime you ship goods to and from that business, you gain a nice share of the profits, made even sweeter when you buy one in a town served exclusively by a rival. The same goes for new technology patents, bidding the highest gets you exclusive rights for the ten years, after which it becomes industry standard. It's a bit like gaining a research bonus in Civilization.

The stock market, which used to be a deep and complex world of back stabbing and game destroying has been watered down to a simple bar on the interface. Each bar is separated into about ten parts, each of which counts as a share, and you can buy or sell your stake by simply clicking on them. The aim of the stock market is to buy low and sell high, but they rarely fluctuate and almost always rise higher and higher as the game wares on and your company inevitably becomes bigger and more profitable. There's no economic or political mechanics anywhere to threaten your company to make it any sort of challenge. Your only enemy is the rivals themselves, who can also buy into your company. They'll frequently buy into each other and strive to buy out the smaller firms and merge them with their own lines, but you'll never, ever be bought out, not even when the biggest competitor has three times as much cash as you and could easily swat you like an annoying little fly. Instead you're allowed to battle away for as long as you like to eventually catch up, overtake, and then buy them out, thus winning the game. It's a noble gesture, but this strips any sense of urgency out of the game knowing you simply cannot lose.

There's little else to talk about regarding gameplay. Station upgrades are simple button clicks which make them larger to hold more cargo and passengers. You can't buy post offices, hotels or saloons to boost your profits and lines are automatically electrified, meaning you can have modern trains running alongside steam engines.

Other than the auction wars when buying companies and patents, Railroads improves on its predecessors with full 3D graphics. You can zoom straight in to see your locomotives in action and even change the view to ride along with them with the camera strapped to the top of the cabin. Everything looks lush and grand, with vibrant colours and outstanding architecture and design, a real treat from the Railroad Tycoon days. Each settlement and supplier is also immediately identifiable from icons above their place names. You can instantly see what Detroit needs and which goods Chicago will supply without ever leaving the game, a great improvement from before when you had to click through menu after menu just to find what was needed of you.

My main gripe however is with Windows Vista. I'm not a programmer, so my knowledge on this topic is minimal at best, but gathered from lengthy Google searches it appears that someone from either Microsoft or Fireaxis threw a spanner in the works with regards to how Railroads handles memory. The game simply runs out of the stuff and crashes, sending you back to the desktop and having to start back from when you last saved. This happens about every ten minutes and is only partially solved by downloading a small program and following a fan-made guide that was originally written for Stalker (which suffers from the exact same problem) to patch and rename some data files. Since this I've only experienced a handful of crashes at much sparser intervals, but that fear of your empire being undone by not saving every few seconds still nags at the back of your mind. This simply isn't good enough, and there's no mention from the developer on a patch to fix this problem.

What Sid Meier did right here was take an ageing series and revamp it with a refreshing and simplistic interface that told you everything you needed to know just by looking at the area of interest. Where this fine tuning has gone wrong is by also simplifying the gameplay to the point that this plays no different from the slurry of tycoon games, the very scurge of gaming. Despite some very lovely looking graphics and sounds, Sid Meier's Railroads! is more style over substance; an idiots guide to trains than the complex financial “think-em-up” that the series once was. If he could go back and just spruce up Railroad Tycoon 2 without touching the gameplay, we'd have a winner on our hands.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 09/08/08

Game Release: Sid Meier's Railroads! (EU, 10/27/06)