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Sid Meier's Railroads ReviewI've spent some good time with the game now and, despite the fact that I'm about as big a fan of Sid Meier's work as you're likely to find, have to admit disappointment with this game. When it comes right down to it, the game seems more like Sid's golf game than the original RRT. It's shallow, fast and just not nearly as fun as you'd hope.
Of course it's not all bad. The graphics are beautiful, the music is great and you actually get a real manual. The game looks nice and plays nice, even on a system which is not a true gaming rig. The animations are great as well and I love how each of the train cars at a depot have to be filled individually with coal or grain or whatever the case may be. The patent auctions are well done as well.
Unfortunately, there are a few problems with the game:
First, the game moves too quickly. For example, if you play the Eastern USA scenario, you may start in Baltimore. You can immediately join with Washington, plunk a depot in Washington, and get a little Grasshopper to run a single mail car and a single passenger car back and forth. By the time the train has made its first run from Baltimore to Washington, you'll have enough money to connect to your second city (Baltimore to Frederick). So you do that, and get your second train. Give it four or five minutes and you'll be able to either double the line between BAL and WAS or create a third line to a nearby resource. Within fifteen minutes you will have connected to every city and needed resource in the vicinity. By then your opponents (assuming you are playing against two) will have pretty well done the same so that every good-sized town has at least one connection. The opponent railroads are a complete mess, with weird overpasses and tunnels all over the place. Much like the previous iterations of RRT, the AI seems to deal with brute force rather than sophistication.
Second, the maps are too small. RRT and RRT2 had a real epic feel. RRT2 was especially good with this, allowing you to make huge railroads stretching across an entire continent. The maps in SMR are tiny in comparison and few in number. This could be my single biggest point of disappointment. It contributes, of course, to the first problem, since you now have three railroads stuck in just a small corner of a country.
Third, the financial game is shallow compared to previous RRTs. The same is true of the economies. There doesn't seem to be much sophistication in this. Also, it is very easy to make great deals of money and, because the game moves so quickly, if you take a few minutes to look around the map, you'll probably find that suddenly you've got a couple million dollars in your account. This may be less the case in the more difficult European scenarios, but certainly I haven't had any trouble making money in the US of A. The stock market offers buy and selling. There is no splitting, no short selling or anything else. There are ten shares per company and that's it. I may just be missing something, but it also seems difficult to know how much different resources are worth, which ones are the most valuable, and so on.
Fourth, there seem to be some problems with routing. It's not unusual to see trains getting all plugged up near stations, even stations with three tracks running through them. The crossovers kind of work, but not as well as you might hope. When a station gets enough traffic running through it (and that may be only 5 or 6 trains) it can really begin to bog down so trains sit endlessly without being able to unload. There have also been times when the little "end of line" roadblocks have refused to go away, even in the middle of a station. That means no trains can run past the roadblock out the other side of the station. To this point I haven't found an easy way of resolving this. I think it will prove difficult to have stations with a large number of trains accessing them.
Fifth, laying track is so automatic it's almost disappointing. Unlike previous games, there do not seem to be a lot of premiums in placing bridges or tunnels. A track running from Phoenix to Flagstaff, which requires at least one major bridge and a couple of long tunnel sections, will only set you back about $500,000. That wouldn't get you very far in previous RRT games, and I think it's better that way. It used to be more important to find just the right route (anyone else remember running trains through the mountains to California in RRT2?), but now it hardly matters anymore. Terrain gets smoothed, tunnels get dug and bridges get built just like that. You can just smack a track wherever you want one and the game takes care of the rest.
Sixth, there is no campaign. This is hugely disappointing as the campaign in RRT2 was one of the best parts of the game (with the exception of those stupid puzzle ones where all you had to do is route trains). The individual scenarios have a list of objectives, but if you are not looking for them, you won't find them and won't heed them. I don't think you ever get reminded of the objectives and they don't seem to have any real bearing on the game. They are just there. Once you finish a scenario there is no connection to the next one--you just start over. All-in-all, this is pretty disappointing.
So overall, I think it has the makings of a great game...they just didn't finish it. The game itself is so good in the way it looks and the way it plays. It pains me that they kept it so shallow.
PS - One more thing. I forgot to mention the strange fact that the economies are not modified depending on the era. So be prepared to funnel steel to an automobile manufacturer in 1830...and one that is based in a city filled with 20th century skyscrapers.
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