As mentioned last week, Railway Empire is a pretty fun business management game. It’s not perfect, but I found it to be enjoyable. I also mentioned that there is a lot of Railway Empire DLC. So many pieces of DLC in fact, that if you own them all (like me) then you end up with a hefty amount of content. As each DLC adds 1 to 3 scenarios, alongside some achievements and new trains, wrapping the game takes a long time. I’ve put more than 150 hours into the game, and I still haven’t managed to get all the achievements for example. Part of this is because the scenarios can be challenging, especially when aiming for a President rating. Another part is that each DLC requires you to complete a 100 year sandbox game. Which takes a while.

With that out of the way, let’s begin looking at the various DLCs. The first DLC released was the Mexico DLC, which adds 1 scenario and 2 trains. It’s a very modest scenario in terms of content, although it does have two different “paths” that can be completed. Once you’ve done the first few tasks, you can side with one of two quest givers, and that then impacts the rest of the scenario. Generally it’s not too difficult and is moderately entertaining. This DLC also includes a new sandbox map, and the ability to play maps in night mode.

Following the Mexico DLC, we head to the other part of North America that has hitherto been missing. Namely Canada, with “The Great Lakes” DLC. Unfortunately this one kind of sucks, with just 1 scenario that’s a bit of a chore to play. It did add Warehouses to the game via a free update, which are useful and let you store excess goods. Aside from that though, if you pay for the scenario then you’ll encounter the new weather system. Which basically means that in the winter months, your trains move extremely slowly. It’s aboot as fun as it sounds. You do also get a new sandbox map and two new trains.

Almost as a form of making up for the Canada DLC, we have the “Crossing the Andes” pack next. Which contains three scenarios. It also has 2 new trains, a night-mode and a new sandbox map. The scenarios themselves are decent I would say, essentially it’s the same map every time with 3 players. Each scenario has you playing as one of these players, while the other 2 are competitors. The map is cordoned off for a while, so that you can build up your railway. Although you’ll need to complete various objectives of course. These scenarios have a nice build up of challenge, and I found the overall map to be decent.

After mucking around the America’s, the next Railway Empire DLC was for Great Britain and Ireland. This one is pretty good (hence the slightly raised price). Although I found the scenario to be extremely long. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but after Mexico and the Crossing the Andes DLCs I’d rather have more shorter scenarios. Than an extremely long one. As for the rest of the content, there’s a new sandbox map of course, alongside 10 whole trains. I think the sandbox map and fiddling with the trains is arguably where the meat of this one lies.

Following the UK DLC, we got the Germany DLC. This one isn’t bad, with one scenario that re-uses an idea from the Mexico DLC. Namely that the scenario splits into two paths, after a certain point, adding replayability. Unfortunately it adds a new feature, that sucks. This new feature is that the map is split into regions. That need to be unlocked, with fat stacks of Deutschmarks. The mission is both quite easy because your competitors are stuck in one region. Whilst also being a bit sluggish as expansion requires large upfront investments. Alongside the new scenario and sandbox map, there are also 10 new trains.

The next Railway Empire DLC was for France. The France DLC is basically a repeat of the German DLC, with two paths through the scenario. Alongside the same lousy region locking system. Although unlocking regions requires a bit less money. The mission is therefore another fairly easy one, with some replayability. You also get 10 new trains, the new sandbox map and a new piece of music. Which I haven’t mentioned for the others, but every DLC comes with a new menu screen and a new piece of music.

After the France DLC, we got the Northern Europe DLC. This one has a single scenario, that kind of sucks. Much like Canada you have the thrilling weather system that just makes the trains go slow in winter. As a bonus, the scenario also starts to veer into the tediously long area. The thrilling regions system also returns again. Oh and you only get 3 new trains this time. In conclusion then, the scenario isn’t good and it combines two of the worst DLC mechanics.

We then suddenly got sent to Australia for the Down Under DLC. This one doesn’t have the same lousy mechanics. Yet it adds a new mechanic that I personally don’t care for. So it’s swings and roundabouts. Essentially you can “choose” what settlements to grow. To do this, you need to ship a certain amount of basic materials to each settlement. These settlements then become normal towns. Various resources are only unlocked if there’s a town nearby though. In theory this lets you “grow” your rail network, as your needs change. The reality is that everything just takes a long time, in an already long scenario. With the cherry on top being a busted rating system for this mission. If you want the best rating, you need to disable the pause mode otherwise it’s literally impossible. Finally there’s a new sandbox map and 3 new trains.

Rounding out the Railway Empire DLC is the Japan DLC pack. This one has two scenarios, and is actually fun. The gimmick this time is that you can adjust passenger routes. Essentially each route gets a passenger satisfaction score. You can tweak this score by changing the train, staff, ticket price and building some new buildings in each town. Such as hotels that increase passenger satisfaction for trains stopping in that town. The scenarios themselves are decently enjoyable, if a bit easy. Even though the region locking mechanic returns. You also get 8 new trains and 3 maps (one is just a combination of the other two).

In conclusion then, most of the Railway Empire DLC is decent. I’d say the Great Lakes and Northern Europe packs are the weakest of the two. Most of the rest are pretty fun, with the Japan and Crossing the Andes packs offering the most content. The rest are somewhere in the middle, I think Mexico and France are stronger than Germany. With Germany being better than the UK and both being less tedious than the Australian one. Ultimately most of them are fairly basic with a scenario, new map and offer a couple hours of content. With 9 different packs though there’s a lot of combined content. Especially for the completionists. None of them are as good as the base game, but if you enjoyed the base game then this is a nice way to get something new to do.

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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.

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Quick Note: Firstly Zoo Tycoon 3 is just called Zoo Tycoon because historical revisionism is BASED. Secondly there are two versions available, the “Ultimate Animal Collection” and the base game. The base game, despite it’s name is actually cringe and you shouldn’t buy it. The ultimate animal collection adds a decent amount of content, has no build limitations on each map (i.e. you can build as much as you want) and once you’ve bought either version, you’re locked in so the marginally cheaper base game is a trap.

Zoo Tycoon 3 is another one of those Xbox One “exclusives” that are also available on PC, but which I’ve picked up for the glorious epoch defining Xbone because used copies are cheap and I like having physical discs. This initially made me uninterested in the game, because it had a bunch of DLC and I didn’t want to have to spend a lot of money on extra content that Microsoft will inevitably nuke at some indeterminable point in the future. Luckily for me and my fellow eccentrics, Microsoft decided to re-release the game with all of it’s extra content as “Zoo Tycoon: Ultimate Animal Collection”. This is version I’m looking at today and frankly thank God I waited because that build limit sounds like an absolute nightmare.

As for the game itself, it’s fun. Not ground breaking and arguably not even a good sequel, but considering the relatively niche that the game represents (or at least did before Zoo Tycoon imitators became a sub-genre of their own again) I was happy to blitz through the campaign missions over the span of a couple of days. These missions are generally pretty fun and have some unique twists, although I must confess that they do get a bit repetitive towards the end – especially with the DLC missions which don’t add anything new to the mix. The way these missions work are simple, you are given a small zoo that invariably sucks. It doesn’t have zoo keepers to keep the animals happy, it doesn’t have janitors to keep the feckless hairless apes from littering everywhere and often it doesn’t have animals in the right exhibits or toilets or something like that. So you start by zooming around, fixing all of the amateur mistakes and then need to start cracking on the mission objectives themselves. These often take the form of “raise zoo fame to X level” “keep the animals happy” “keep the guests happy” and sometimes interact with the new gimmick features this game has (more on that later). The gist for basically all of them is to stabilise the park, get profit rolling in and then purchase the right animals or just keep building up the zoo to tick the various mission checklists. It’s more fun than it sounds, but as mentioned the game isn’t ground breaking or revolutionary. Essentially you’re just playing a series of sandboxes, but with a somewhat strict timer attached to force you to spend money on the right things in generally the right order. Towards the end of the campaign, the game loves to hoist objectives on you that just take a lot of time so there’s some waiting involved which can be a tedious to be honest.

The other thing that’s tedious about this mode is the way that building things works in Zoo Tycoon 3. You see everything outside of a handful of basic structures – and I do mean basically everything – requires it to have been researched. You research it by trying to build the item and then being told you have to wait between 10 and 150 seconds for it to research (which costs money by the way) before you can build it. No, you can’t queue research so you need to say “I’d like to build a janitors office” and then wait a minute doing something else before you can build one – then realise you can’t build something else, so you need to wait for that to be researched. By the time you’re on mission 26 of 30, this starts to feel like padding because you’re researching the same things again and again and again like a medium Grasslands exhibit so you can have more than 3 antelopes. Why have more than 3? Because if there is less than 4, they get lonely and aren’t happy which means you are losing value from them. It also means they’re not happy, but they’re not real so moral qualms are an irrelevance. This might not sound like the spirit of the game, but you’re running a zoo for animals too dumb to survive so don’t blame the player blame the game. In this case the game is Zoo Tycoon 3 and it’s fun, but repetitive.

To alleviate the tedium, the game has a bunch of mechanics that are largely gimmicks but do make it great for kids and the young at heart. There’s a scrapbook (or was it snapshot album? Something like that) feature which encourages you to take cute pictures of every animal in the game. Then there’s the ability to make interactive exhibits for each animal enclosure, so that you can feed the elephants bananas or make silly faces with the chimpanzees or blast water at the rhinos. These are cute if insubstantial and I fear that a decent chunk of the development budget went towards these. The issue isn’t even that they’re not entertaining, but all animals act the same and the interactive mini-games are exceedingly shallow so if you’ve blasted a hippo with water blasting a rhino is the same experience. One last thing that’s slightly more worthwhile is the fact that you can breed your animals, which gives you a chance of getting an albino variant. This doesn’t do anything, but because Microsoft hates the achievement hunters it has spawned like poachers in the Serengeti you need every albino animal to get 100%. Oh and to have taken a picture of them too. There’s also the ability to release your animals to the the wild, which gives you some occasional notifications about how they’re doing great but otherwise doesn’t really do anything. I mean you get a slight boost to your Zoo’s fame, which is the main metric by which you unlock things (after researching them of course) but it’s barely a mechanic. You’re basically just selling them but instead of getting cash you get fame aka XP. The big fat main gimmick though is that you can switch from the overview mode, to a 3rd person mode and wander around your own Zoo. You can even drive a buggy around! No, you can’t run people over though.

Which brings to mind all the other little restricts that the game has undertaken to make everything appropriate for the kids. Even then, considering how morbid most fairy tales are (let alone the AI generated YouTube nightmares investing the platform) I can’t help but feel this is a little misguided. You can’t release the hungry hungry hippos by demolishing the fence for instance. In fact there’s no way to be anything but a benevolent zoo keeper, the game won’t let the animals hurt each other and you can’t starve them because they get swiped confiscated by less evil zookeepers. The whole thing is exceedingly twee and you’re never going to see a notification about how your released animal got killed by a fat dentist on safari. It’s not a big issue, but it also accompanies a big restriction in how much freedom you have. Because every exhibit has been pre-created, you can’t actually create a custom area for your animals – instead there are a selection of pre-made ones you are given the privilege of building. So if you want to make a sick custom lion exhibit then you can get the heck outta here. This means the game does feel kinda shallow, because you’re just slapping together various pre-made assets and outside of deciding where to place them you don’t get much say. To compound this issue, one of the main requirements guests have is that you have a good variety of animals. Which is understandable. But there are only just over a dozen species that can get in the main exhibits, with most animals being reskins of those (for example there are quite a few bears that uh… all have the same animations and needs and wants and dreams and aspirations). Most animals get shafted and are put in “mini-exhibits” which only allow between 2 and 3 (rarely 4) of them to be in a little fountain or patch of rock at a time. Can you customise these? Hahahaha NO!

So the meat of the game is less about running the Zoo you envisaged and more about the simulation of running a zoo. Or alternatively, of bumbling around your zoo like a dorky guest. Speaking of which, if you wander around for a bit you’ll notice that the various NPCs that are generated all have a handful of animations at most. Plus the skyboxes aren’t great. Which are small problems I admit and fully understand, but considering how neutered the zoo building is I think it’s a fair point to mention. I can only assume that you can’t build your own exhibits, or have a ton of different animals (like dinosaurs or aquatic life as per previous games in the series) because Zoo Tycoon 3 lets you bumble around the park in full 3D including Kinect support (WOW) with interactions instead of relying on one camera angle and sprite work. Which means that once the novelty of the gimmicks wear off, you’re relying on the core simulation aspect of Zoo Tycoon 3 to carry the experience. Alas the simulation is honestly pretty basic.

You see the way that Zoo Tycoon 3 tracks everything is basically just a simple balancing act. You have a “Zoo Fame” level (think of it like XP) which determines the variety of stuff you can buy. To get more XP, you build more things. These things cost money, but fortunately your XP increases the amount of guests visiting which generates more money. Therefore the more things you build, the more money you get to the point that you’d have to start seriously screwing around to actually lose money over time. The catch is that money trickles in, and I do mean trickles in. This is actually how the campaign missions provide their challenge, because the time limit only gives you so much time and therefore income to do everything that’s required of you. For more casual players though, this is an irrelevance. In fact it’s a total irrelevance because sandbox has no money worries at all. You just have infinite money. So the simulation is a total gongshow in the sandbox mode that most people actually care about. As for the campaign, well the money worries are only a factor because of the time limit. As for the rest of the simulation, you’ve got guest happiness and animal happiness. Guest happiness is a global value, represented as the accumulation of multiple factors such as entertainment, animal variety, bathroom availability, tidiness and so on. The problem with this though, is that it’s a global value. So if you have low bathroom happiness, you can build some bathrooms in the middle of nowhere and so long as they’re connected it doesn’t matter. Sure you’ll probably place them around the zoo in an attempt at roleplaying, but it doesn’t matter. Similarly if the tidiness if low, you just hire more janitors. Entertainment low? Build more entertainment buildings. So guest happiness is really just about keeping an eye on some meters that you can see at any time by holding down a trigger, and building whatever is needed. Keep the happiness high and people will keep coming, so you get money to buy things, to get more XP to unlock things, so you can build new things, to get more XP and then get more guests, who will want more bathrooms and so on. As for animal happiness, it’s global within the exhibit. So as long as you have a feeding machine, one interactive entertainment, one animal washer and the right habitat type plus the minimum number of animals to fulfil the social stat you’re all good. Now you do have to repair and restore the feeders and washers… unless you hire zoo keepers which you will, because otherwise it gets pretty tedious.

There are some other things you can faff around with, like advertising (which just increases the maximum amount of guest you can have over your XP allowance) and park research (which uses the same research timers so I never bothered with it) or you can optimise the prices of various things (which again I never bothered with because the defaults are fine and in sandbox you have infinite money anyway). Yet ultimately these can’t cover the cracks at the heart of the game’s simplistic simulation. So the sandbox is restricted, if appreciably good looking in 3rd person and the economy side is basically a sideshow. How can I then say I had fun? Well, the campaign missions are basically a series of light puzzles that encourage you to do all the various faffing. You’ll need to have X number of different animals, to interactive with the elephants and the chimps, to breed kangaroos and then take a picture of the baby, to do these while not letting any guest satisfaction bar drop below green and so on. It’s not an onerous challenge, but it’s still a satisfying one and trying to lay out my zoo with a tight budget and a tight deadline was often fun. Sure the sandbox mode is a let-down and everything else is a bit janky, but the campaign is still enjoyable at least as someone who only played the originals a little bit (I was too busy with Simcity 3000 and Warcraft 3).

So in conclusion, Zoo Tycoon 3 is a flawed game that struggles to compete with it’s predecessors which were made for far simpler hardware. Yet if you can overlook the game’s simplistic simulation and/or haven’t played the previous games much, it’s an enjoyable if shallow little tycoon game. Sure the sandbox is limited by having no economy, but to unlock things in the sandbox you need to play the campaign and challenge mode as otherwise your sandbox will be stuck at a low level forever. As such you need to play the other modes to get to relax in the sandbox, and these other modes provide a modest challenge and some variety. Plus the gimmicks are kind of nice, I mean the animals do look good and the photo mode and interactions are cute… at least for a while. As such I’d recommend Zoo Tycoon with two caveats. The first is that fans of the previous games will be disappointed. The second is that those who missed out on those games, will probably prefer them unless they are literally children. For those willing to give the shot on it’s own merits however, I can’t imagine that they won’t get a solid dozens out of the campaign and close to double that if they care about the challenge mode and want to play around with the sandbox side. Considering that the game is available on Gamepass or for a low price of around a tenner on disc (or Steam sale) it’s hard to recommend people avoid the game entirely. Just be aware that this is another example of a franchise who’s best days are far behind it.

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