TL;DR – Railroad Corporation is an alright railway business simulator, that manages to be simultaneously surprisingly good and also pretty underwhelming. I guess part of the reason for my mixed feeling, is that this is a game by a very small development studio. Despite the lack of budget and staff however, the game is generally good and while missing one or two features is surprisingly competitive with some of the bigger games in this category. At the same time, it has a bunch of drawbacks and quirks that stand in the way of me recommending it over it’s competitors. As such I’d say that Railroad Corporation is decent, but nothing that special. If you’ve played through Railway Empire and Railroad Tycoon then sure give it a go. Otherwise I’d probably recommend playing something like Sid Meier’s Railroads.
Railroad Corporation is another one of those games that I don’t remember buying, and can only assume that I got it included as some sort of bundle. Unlike most games with that earn that dubious epithet however, I actually thought Railroad Corporation looked interesting and wasn’t that bad to play. I’d even go so far as to say that I had fun with Railroad Corporation and found it to be a bit addicting. With that being said, it’s a pretty standard railroad business simulation game. You control a railway company, you need to build the tracks between various settlements and then run trains between them. The idea being that you’ll transport various resources between towns, farms and mines to earn a profit and to grow those settlements. As the settlements grow, they demand a broader range of products and these “higher level” products provide higher profits. There are the standard additional add-ons, like the ability to buy businesses, research new types of trains, hire staff for modest bonuses (e.g. cheaper bridges or more profit for transporting grain) and so on. As for the setting, it’s America during the 19th century which is par for the course. Most games in this sub-genre use this setting, down to the time-period and what trains you can research and eventually buy. In terms of the content you get, there are 12 campaign scenarios where you race to achieve various tasks (e.g. deliver 20 shipments of cloth to settlement X) and the ability to play these maps in scenario mode. Honestly so far it’s pretty standard stuff, nothing particularly exciting in terms of the setting, narrative, gameplay mechanics or amount of content.
In fact one of the biggest things to note about Railroad Corporation is not what it adds, but what it takes away. Unlike basically every other railway management game, in Railroad Corporation you can’t set signals or otherwise decide what routes your trains will take. Instead everything is managed by the game, on your behalf. You still decide which trains to run, where they go and what items they load or unload, but that’s about it. This makes it both very approachable, and also a tad bizarre. From my own experience, the AI is actually good at managing these train routes. Yet the omission of the ability to customise routes is definitely something that felt surreal even if I actually didn’t miss it too much. Aside from this aspect of the railway management being culled, my only other issue with something lacking was how the game managements owned businesses. As mentioned, you can buy any business in the game via an auction between yourself and all other players (including the AI competitors). The catch is while in other games you would still receive money as per usual for delivering to your own businesses, in Railroad Corporation you… don’t. So if you buy a wheat farm, you don’t have to pay for grain. On the flip-side, if you buy a farm that takes grain to produce meat, then you don’t get paid for delivering grain to a farm you own. Which is fine, but if you own all the stages of a production chain then you end up with multiple trains that are seemingly in the red. Often to staggering sums. You’ll still make a profit overall once the end product is delivered to a city, but when checking whether each train is profitable these trains really stand out for the wrong reasons. Oh and before you ask, no you can’t sort your list of trains by the type of train, profitability etc. Which is another weirdly missing feature, albeit a more minor one.
The real issue I had with the game though, is that the campaign is quite often a bit annoying. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly halfway through the campaign it goes “oopsie woopsie, we’ve reset all your research :3” so you are dumped back on the most basic of trains which is a bit of a kicker. In Railroad Corporation the various research projects are expensive and often take a lot of time, so having them reset halfway through the game is a pain. Fortunately the fact they take a lot of time isn’t an issue in reality, because so do most of the later scenarios. I would spend around 3 hours on a lot of the Act 2 missions and apparently I was about 10 hours ahead of the times on the HowLongToBeat website. This is partly due to them being a staggered series of objectives, most of which are somewhat convoluted (e.g. transport 20 high-tier products to this one place on the opposite side of the map). It’s mainly due to the AI players being a total pain in the backside to deal with. They’re not hugely difficult to overcome, but they are really annoying to deal with. Not only does the game often give them advantages in the form of better resource supplies and thus the potential for better railway connections, but they’re also exempt from various requirements. In addition they operate fairly quickly, don’t need to dabble with research and love to start auctioning off various industries as soon as they are able to. On the other hand, they generally aren’t that difficult to overcome because they are stupid. They’ll always get stuck at a certain point, and while they do grow at a constant rate they seem reluctant to share railway tracks and as such tend to avoid anywhere you’ve already expanded to.
Yet while the AI is easy to overcome in the long-run, the missions are often structured in such a way so that they’re most difficult from the very beginning. I wouldn’t say that the campaign of Railroad Corporation is particularly hard, but the Act 2 missions really stack the cards against you at the start of each one. You’ll often barely have time to complete the first objective or two, and constantly be struggling to balance your overdraft with the hard-coded requirements. Making a single rail-line can often make or break the early stages of a scenario in the later missions. Once you’ve overcome these exceedingly tight requirements though, the missions become much, much easier. To the point that you’ll always have plenty of time to start maxing out your research tree because you’re just waiting for the last objective or two to get wrapped up. It’s a weird issue that hinders the overall enjoyment of the campaign somewhat, because you’ll end up getting stuck in a mission for a few attempts due to one or two early objectives then breeze through the rest of the mission for a couple of hours. As such it can feel pretty inconsistent, and the only time events spiralled out of my control was due to the AI cheating. Well, maybe it’s more fair to say that the scenario cheated on the AI’s behalf, but it was much easier for the AI to reach a certain company valuation before me because it had a much better layout of various resources and towns. Otherwise the missions are either easy (like the first 6 in Act 1) or front-loaded in terms of challenge.
With all that being said, I still that Railroad Corporation is a decent enough game in spite of it’s wonky balancing and missing features. As stated at the top of this review, I had a fun time playing through it despite the occasional set-backs and was able to power it through it without too much trouble. The scenarios themselves provide a pretty solid introduction to the game’s mechanics, and while there isn’t much additional content once you’ve blitzed through them the game does have a bunch of DLC and even some free post-launch scenarios to work through. As for the actual gameplay itself, Railroad Corporation is fairly competent and handles well (albeit with some significant slowdown during track-laying) while still offering some depth. Between the ability to build new businesses, upgrade stations, research new trains and hire staff there’s plenty to do to optimise your company. The basics are all there and work fine, while the additional tweaking and twiddling does let you gain an edge over the AI.
As for the rest of the package, well it’s fine. You’ve got some period appropriate music that’s nice enough even if I felt like the OST is a bit too limited for it’s own good. While the music isn’t bad, most scenarios take a few hours and as such the music tends to loop a bit much. As for the visuals, I think they’re pleasant to look at although you can’t zoom in too much unlike some other games in the genre. Everything looks pretty good and as mentioned outside of track-laying the game performs well on high settings, at least on my current laptop (with a Nvidia 4060 and 12th gen intel i7 12700). There’s therefore not that much to complain about, aside from grousing over one or two missing features and the weird difficulty curve that this game has. Otherwise it’s a good looking, well playing and fairly optimised game albeit nothing particularly special.
In summary then, Railroad Corporation is a perfectly acceptable game in the railway tycoon sub-genre. Nothing about it really stands out as being great, but it doesn’t really have any significant negatives either. Sure there are a few things I could quibble about like occasional performance dips, the way that the game autosaves over it’s last autosave when you’ve loaded it, some wonky balance and a fairly bland setting but there’s nothing major to whine about. It’s just a decent little railroad game, that will take you around 25ish hours to get through. There’s enough content to justify the price, even if it’s hard to recommend this game over it’s competition. After all, this is a space with some stand out games like the Railroad Tycoon series and even for my money Sid Meier’s Railroads. As such I’d say that if you’ve played the rest, then you’ll probably enjoy this one. For everyone else, I wouldn’t recommend Railroad Corporation as your starting point. Not because it’s bad, but just because it’s not the best either.