Thankfully, Railroads! is a lot more user friendly than its predecessor. However, keep in mind that cities only have three build slots, so you can't upgrade a city to have every industry in it. You're not just making money from delivering raw materials and goods around the map, as you get a profit from the factories and mills that you construct, as well. This has the upside of you being able to reap some of the profits, because you can create a vertical monopoly of sorts. Those industries may already be there, or you can build them yourself to create demand for the goods. Lumber from a mill must be transported to a city where a furniture factory or paper mill is. Your job will be to link all of these businesses together. At the beginning, the countryside will be dotted with small towns and villages, as well as various industries, such as farms, lumber mills, coal mines, and more. You'll start with a randomly selected city that has a train station and a bit of track, and from there you must build a railroad and economic empire. The game has a number of scenarios set in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere around the world, along with some fanciful settings that offer unusual geographical challenges. Railroads! may look like a model railroad come to life, but its looks mask a deep economic strategy game.Īs with the original game, your job will be to start a fledgling railroad in the early days of industrialization and grow and manage it through the decades. The result is that you'll focus less on mundane tasks and more on decision making, since every decision that you make can have repercussions later on. Just like Firaxis did with Civilization IV, GameSpot's Best PC Game of 2005, the core elements of Railroads have been distilled and lots of the old clutter removed. So how do you improve on a formula that's been thoroughly covered? The answer is to get back to the basics. Railroad Tycoon inspired countless imitators, and we've seen everything from theme parks to cruise lines to airlines to prison tycoon games. Of course, a lot has changed since Railroad Tycoon shipped over a decade and a half ago. And from what we've experienced, Railroads! has all the makings of another classic. Now the developers at Firaxis Games are revisiting Railroad Tycoon with Railroads!, and we got our hands on the finished version of the game for one last look before the review. You weren't just laying down track and watching trains move around the map you were building an economic empire and battling cutthroat rivals along the way. The original Railroad Tycoon took a deceptively simple idea (build a virtual model railroad) and imbued it with incredibly deep and addicting strategic gameplay. Despite having a slightly different name from its illustrious predecessor, make no mistake that Sid Meier's Railroads! is the true heir to the 1990 strategy game that practically gave birth to the entire tycoon-building genre.
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