Long awaited return of Sid Meier to the Railroad series a let down.

User Rating: 5 | Sid Meier's Railroads! PC
By Saranis | Review Date:
As a long time player of the Railroad Tycoon series I've been anxiously awaiting this release. After seeing what Sid did with Pirates! I was expecting a game which built upon what had been achieved in the franchise since his departure. Instead I find a game lacking the depth of the last.

The industries do NOT deliver goods via water ways like they did in RRT3, nor can you even BUY them. You ARE able to buy production centers such as the Automobile Factory which will convert Steel to Automobiles, The Steel Mill you again are able to buy, but it requires coal to make steel, the Coal Mine you are UNABLE to buy. If you want coal, you must build a rail out to the mine and set up an annex. Then set up a train to deliver the said cargo to where it can be converted into usable goods.

The Stock Market is really quite lame, even worse than that in RRT3 where the AI opponent would often drive themselves into bankruptcy. Instead the AI will sell all stock in their own company and neglect to buy it back. In one game I had far less money than the AI and was able to buy up 100% of their company's stock ending the game.

You are able to build industries to a certain point, in a village/town you can have 1 industry (usually set already,) in a city you are able to have 2, in a Metropolis you can have 3. Once an industry is built in a city there is no way to remove it.

Maps are far too cramped for my liking, on one map once I built up enough I had 3 cities that were all jumbled together and looked more like 1 giant city than 3 separate ones. This made editing the tracks probably the most difficult aspect of the game. Like they say, you can look at a city and see what it has, but unlike they say doing so requires a lot of squinting and rotating the camera.

Now for the biggest killer of all, The CTDs, frequent and hard. Worse is the fact that I think Firaxis knew about them before releasing the game and decided instead of fixing them they were going to add an auto save feature that runs every couple minutes (not at years end like in RRT3, but during the game) which will lag the game on even top of the line rigs. In the end I cant recommend the game to anyone who has Railroad Tycoon 3. Even the new players would be better served to get that game over this one.

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