This is a pretty game that is at least five years behind RT3 in terms of gameplay...
It is also a much simpler economic simulation than its predecessors, such as Railroad Tycoon III (RT3). This is not necessarily a bad thing. The stock market in RT3 wasn't too complicated for me, but it did take a little while to get the hang of it. Stocks are much simpler in SMR, and that's fine. However, sometimes saying that a game is supposed to be simpler, is just an excuse not to include obvious innovations that have already been made in previous games. In many ways, SMR takes this step backward.
In a world where there wasn't a Railroad Tycoon III, this game would get a much better score from me. However, if you've ever played RT3, then this game will certainly frustrate you. For example, in RT3 no two competitors can build a train depot in the same town, but you can connect to your competitors track and still gain many of the same benefits as if you had. In SMR however, the map quickly becomes tangled in competitors' tracks as everyone tries to build depots in all the same cities. There ends up being bridges over other peoples' track EVERYWHERE, and it looks and plays like crap. This is especially pronounced because cities are much closer together and you have much less room to work with in SMR. Some other things that RT3 does better:
1) RT3 has an undue button while you're laying track; SMR does not.
2) In RT3 you can zoom all the way in until you're practically sitting in the locomotive; you can't zoom in far at all in SMR, which is a shame considering that the updated graphics are probably the best part of the game.
3) In RT3 you can zoom all the way out until you can see every city on the map as a little dot; in SMR you will never be able to zoom out far enough to see more than 4 cities on the map. This makes strategizing on a grand scale a pain.
4) In RT3 your trains can be automated to load up whatever is the most valuable commodity in the next city, unless you want to specifically instruct them to load something else. In SMR, you have to tell each train what to load up every time. This wouldn't be such a big deal, if things never changed. But if a city upgrades then you have to go through a list of all of your trains and add cars for other commodities that the city now needs. Maybe if clicking on a city brought up a list of trains that serviced that city, then this wouldn't be such a big deal. But clicking through a list of 30 or 40 trains every five minutes will surely tick you off.
5) In RT3 laying double track over single track takes 2 seconds and uses up almost no additional space. In SMR laying double track is a gargantuan nightmare, and is strangely complicated for a game that seems to be trying very hard to be simple.
I understand that RT3 and SMR are two different games, and that SMR is meant to be more accessable to a wider range of players. But the problems that I've listed above are problems that make the game MORE complicated, not less so.
In short, I enjoyed playing this game because of the cutsy graphics, but after a while my frustration over obvious flaws got the better of me. My system crashed for the final time two days ago, and I haven't started the game up again since.