Others say...

"Fun While It Lasts: Performance Problems"
For people who are used to Railroad Tycoon 2 or 3, this is not the same game. Gone are all the intricate details and the sophisticated finances. The result is a game that is more fun to play in that the strategies are stripped down to straightforward financial plays. This makes the game much easier to learn, but less fun in the long run.

A source of disappointment was the lack of vertical integration of industries. One of the aspects I always enjoyed about the older RT games was that you could integrate nitrates -> fertilizer -> grain -> cattle -> food, making money every step of the way. In Railroads!, the operation is simplified to Cattle -> Food, and that's it. No fertilizers, no shipping grain to the cattle yard to increase production, just a simple operation. The real reason for this is that one of the game dynamics is that you are limited to 3 to 4 parallel tracks running through a station; to move all those other goods would be a logistical nightmare the game couldn't handle.

Speaking of nightmares, the biggest problem with the game is that it constantly crashes, even with all the updates. I have a brand new Pentium 2.33x1.33 dual core processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 256MB graphics card and the son of a gun still crashes unexpectedly toward the end of the game.

The game is very fun, graphics and sounds are great, but you need a robust computer to unleash its full power. Even then, it might not work properly. It's a fun game that goes quickly (as opposed to marathon sessions of Civilization). That's because the developers concentrated on making it a "fun" game rather than a "realistic" game. At least that means a swift end to a failing railroad. Hopefully, the game remains stable long enough to get to that point; often it crashes by the time the map is filled up with rail lines.

"Boxcars of fun !"
I love this game, I play it for hours. I don't know where the time goes...
The graphics are wonderful, but require a pretty hefty video card and processor with lots of RAM.

"1 Step Forward 2 Steps Back"
Being a long time Railroad Tycoon fan, I had high hopes for this one. I figure if Sid Meier is going to wallpaper his name all over the package it must be something special.

For fans of the RR Tycoon series I can sum it up real easy for you. They spent all their time rebuilding and redesigning the track building feature in this game and they dumbed down everything else so the attention deficit 12yr olds can play it.

All the great economic model detail from Tycoon 3 was tossed out the window or pretty much ignored and they pushed for simplification. No longer are you able to position buildings within towns, they just sorta sprout up like weeds as you sprinkle magic supply & demand fertilizer on em.

The Pros:
* Track Building system is really a HUGE improvement over the Tycoon series
* Nice graphics, bright & colorful, exagerated but not cartooney, a nice balance
* Animations at various supply stations are fun to watch (the cattle loading, the coal chutes, etc)
* It plays a little faster than the RRT games... you can finish a game inside of an hour
* the land conforms to the track as you lay it, allowing for appropriate inclines

The Cons:
* the land maybe conforms too much to the track as you lay it
* They sorta ruin the economic system from RRT3, it feels too simplistic
* Unable to analyze supply & demand trade routes
* The business strategy side of the game is inferior to RRT3
* No cabooses? ...now that's just odd!
* Individual missions feel disjointed, no real feeling of accomplishment upon completion
* Simplified game style promotes track laying sprint gameplay
* Cannot lay disconnected track from your main line

Summary:

Overall, if you're totally new to the overhead train management genre of gaming and you're looking for a train game that is more in-step with a scale-hobbyist toy train style game. You'll no doubt enjoy this game. It also makes for a nice intro to train mgmnt strategy games and is suitable in complexity for the 10-15yr old.

If you're a longtime RRT fan and was hoping for an advancement of the RRT3 series; I'm afraid you'll feel as though you've taken 1 step forward (track building) and 2 steps back (dumbed down strategy).

The most amazing part of the game is without a doubt it's track building. You always lay single track, but if you lay single track next to an existing track, it snaps perfectly to the other track allowing you to build these great multi-track lines 3-4-5-6 sets of rails, and adding track switches between the connected lines is perfectly executed. There's absolutely zero frustration in trying to make one track tie into another, which has always been a bit of a frustration in the RRT series. At stations you do have to limit your track pairing down to 3, but 3 is plenty for a station stop.

I believe the perfect RRT game would basically take RRT3 and add to it the track building features of SM Railroads. And perhaps allow the users a little more control over managing the switches and orchestrating train movement. If the player wants to play Gomez Adams and smash trains together in colossal mid-bridge explosions, why not let em?

If Sid Meier should choose to release a sequel to this one with some of the detail of RRT3 he'd have a blockbuster to truly be proud of. ...and if you're gonna build a table-top HO scale style game, you gotta have cabooses!






"Very Enjoyable and Fun"
I'm reading all the bad reviews for this game, and I can't believe it! I own several Sid Meier games, and this is among the better ones (so far none beat Civ IV).

The Pros:
- Great graphics
- Easy to learn
- Similar to Railroad Tycoon series if you have played that before
- Sandbox mode (though I have not even tried that)
- Consequential play (for example, more highly trafficked cities and stops will grow more - and thus have both higher supply and demand - than less highly trafficked ones).
- Easier track building and routing of trains (eliminates those hassles from the Railroad Tycoon series)
- Levels well tailored to player's skill level

The Cons:
- VERY memory intensive: I am running a fully optimized Intel P4 2.93 GHz, 1024k RAM, with an after-market Radeon X700 graphics card and the game still begins to lag after a few hours of consecutive playing time at full resolution. Also, it will freeze if you run large programs in the background. And finally, my system always has low virtual memory upon exit.
- Too simple / not enough options. Not as bad as "Sid Meier's Pirates", but still only a few buildings and car types.
- Track laying still needs improvements. Tracks that seem to switch do not, etc.

Overall, I find this game fun. It's definitely worth the $13 that Amazon is currently charging for it.

"People who like this sort of thing will find this to be the sort of thing they like"
I read the other reviews for Sid Meier's Railroads and saw a lot of disappointment about its properties as a game and about the system crashes. I've never played it as a multi-player game like SimCity and had no intention of doing that, so I can't comment on that aspect. I bought it because a certain 6-year old is crazy about trains and I thought computer software would be cheaper and less time consuming than building an actual model railroad in the basement - without upsetting the Mrs in the process. It was terribly buggy at first (we both were horrified to build a scenario only to see everything disappear), but once I downloaded the patches from the website, most of the problems vanished. We put it in the single player table-top mode and I showed him how to lay track and make trains. He loves watching the trains go around, swapping out engines, and changing the color schemes. When he gets tired of it, we go to a new scenario and start anew.

Another added bonus is the music. For example, go through Chicago, and you get Robert Johnson's "Sweet Home Chicago", while running through Cleveland gets you Ramblin' Jack Elliott's "Wreck of the Old 97".

We've gotten our money's worth - I would have given this five stars, but there are still persistent bugs despite the patches so I knocked off a star. If one tries to lay overly complex tracks that go through mountains or big sweeping curves that go off the map, it will hang. I've learned that if you do a CTRL-ALT-DEL to exit the program and reenter it, the program is still cranking away in the background and you can continue playing.

If you're looking for a relatively simple program to simulate trains that children (and adults) can enjoy, then this game may be for you.