TL;DR – Railway Empire is probably my favourite railroad management game since the excellent Sid Meier’s railroads. It has it’s flaws, but has plenty of content, is approachable and generally is quite enjoyable.
Railway Empire has ended up as one of my most played games on Steam, largely due to it’s prolific amount of DLC. Yet in spite of the excessive amount of playtime the DLC has added, the base game itself is certainly no slouch. Not only is there a full campaign with multiple missions that serves as a glorified tutorial of the game’s systems, but there are also more than a dozen scenarios. These scenarios are quite similar to the campaign missions. While they have a bit less polish, they add a good bit of extra challenge.
As for the game itself, Railway Empire is a fun little railroad management business simulator. Par for the course, it revolves around connecting cities and businesses. You take the goods that towns and factories need, then ship them into towns. Once the towns are stocked, they’ll gradually grow and develop businesses. These businesses then produce products that other towns will need. At the same time, you’re connecting the cities up and so you can start to transport larger and larger amounts of goods. Of course as you make a profit on every train-car of cargo (or passengers) shipped, your business grows. Which funds the placement of new tracks, the purchasing of new trains and thus the creation of new routes.
The twist with the gameplay mentioned above, is that you’ll need to achieve certain objectives. So you might need to grow a city to a certain size, by a certain date. Or ship so many of a certain good, to a certain destination. This sounds straightforward, but because you’ll have multiple goals at the same time, budget limitations play a role. As such you can often find yourself struggling to achieve these objectives. Especially as the game punishes you, if you aren’t able to achieve them in half the time. This punishment occurs through a reduction of the final score.
Once you’ve got through all of those objectives across the campaign and scenarios, you can enjoy the sandbox mode. Which lets you play through any of the maps from the previous modes, during any time period from 1830 through to 1930 that you choose. Each time period has it’s own trains and some technologies, although these technologies are largely the same. This is because the technologies add +5% engine power, or +8% more passengers waiting in stations and so on.
As for the other aspects of Railway Empire, they’re also pretty good. You can ride along any train in “real-time”, and even blow the horn. The graphics are pretty good, although I’d recommend limiting the frame-rate in the options. Otherwise my PC tended to try and throttle itself aiming for hundreds of frames per second. The music is also period appropriate and fine, although it does repeat itself a bit much. Finally there are some other things to manage. You can buy businesses, construct factories and hire staff. These are good ways to make a bit of extra money once you know what you’re doing.
With all that being said, there are some quirks and niggles in Railway Empire. Firstly, the AI opponents are extremely annoying. You can’t share tracks unlike some other games, so you’ll need to construct tunnels and bridges galore to compete with them. They field an insane number of trains, while also obnoxiously over-bidding. They’re bad at growing towns, and irritating to deal with at the higher levels as they cheat. As for the trains, mass upgrades are tedious to perform especially as you keep researching new trains. The track-laying tool is good, although it can be unforgiving with angles. Plus it loves to create expensive routes, that with a modicum of tweaking become much cheaper. Finally I found that too many of the scenarios ended with me sitting on the bonds screen, trying to buyout my competitors. A lengthy process, even if your business is clearly more successful than theirs.
In conclusion then, Railroad Empire is a pretty fun little railroad management game that has a lot of content. It’s not perfect, but with good visuals and lots of tweaks to make it is an engrossing game. The rating system also gives it so much needed challenge, while aiming for the achievements will take you a while. Ultimately I’d consider it a solid game, even if I think that some maps can just take a bit too long. As such I’d recommend it to any fans of this mini-genre, although I think Sid Meier’s Railroads is a better starting point for those who are unsure.