Has the feel of a table-top game
User Rating: 6 | Sid Meier's Railroads! PC
I've probably sunk well over a thousand hours into all the iterations of Railroad Tycoon going back to the original DOS version of the first one. I've enjoyed them all immensely and was looking forward to Sid Meier's and his worker bees advancing the brand yet again with this game. They did not. It's not that it's a bad game or broken, just disappointing. The visuals are all wrong. There's no sense of a train moving between two cities on a representational map of the land. It feels more like a bulky Christmas train set hoisted on to a kitchen table. The track laying and business elements have been simplified in such a way as to make them less satisfying than in any of the previous versions of Railroad Tycoon. I realize simplification is the path to success when updating gaming franchises and that it probably does draw in more players but simplification also turns off players who cut their teeth on the more robust challenges of earlier titles. My bottom line is that if you love model trains and just want a computer game that will let you watch pretty trains moving across colorful albeit claustrophobic settings, buy this game. But if you're looking for the things that made the original Railroad Tycoon or II or III beloved games, give this one a pass.
