Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Nov 19, 2021

  Listen, realtalk: This game is scratching my itch for model trains in such a way that i was able to sell my IRL ones. Saved me a hell of a lot of cash. But dont play for Money or economic. And dont play with less than 32GB RAM.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 1, 2021

  This game gets you into the main menu in only like one second after you launch it in Steam. Why aren't all games like this?
• gamedeal user

  Dec 31, 2021

  Brilliant game for just playing idly, I could literally build railways on this for hours. Vast Steam Workshop library can also make your game experience totally unique as well. ---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☑ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{ Audience }--- ☑ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☐ Grandma ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☐ Potato ☑ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☐ Easy ☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{ Grind }--- ☐ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☑ Isn't necessary to progress ☐ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second live for grinding ---{ Story }--- ☐ No Story ☑ Some lore ☐ Average ☐ Good ☐ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short ☐ Average ☐ Long ☑ To infinity and beyond ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☐ Worth the price ☑ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{ Bugs }--- ☑ Never heard of ☐ Minor bugs ☐ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs ---{ ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☐ 7 ☐ 8 ☑ 9 ☐ 10
• gamedeal user

  Feb 17, 2022

  It's a giant digital train set for grown men. Whats not to love?
• gamedeal user

  May 9, 2022

  GREAT REMINDS ME OF MY DAYS BUILDING MODEL TRAIN LAYOUTS YEARS AGO BEFORE INTERNET
• gamedeal user

  Jul 6, 2022

  Very fun game! Someone should get Musk a copy, he'd be amazed at all these not over-engineered traffic solutions (shoutout to Adam Something!)
• gamedeal user

  Sep 26, 2022

  I wanted a game that was like Cities/Skylines but with the emphasis on the transportation instead of the city building. This is it! I don't play it to make profits or create elaborate supply chains but I DO use it as my model railroad and airplane layouts. Having so much fun building maps and using different equipment to simulate different eras in history. Thumbs up from me!
• gamedeal user

  Nov 15, 2022

  ---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☑ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{ Audience }--- ☐ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☐ Grandma ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☐ Potato ☐ Decent ☑ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☐ Easy ☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☑ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{ Grind }--- ☐ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☑ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding ---{ Story }--- ☐ No Story ☑ Some lore ☐ Average ☐ Good ☐ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short ☐ Average ☐ Long ☑ To infinity and beyond ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☑ Worth the price ☐ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{ Bugs }--- ☐ Never heard of ☑ Minor bugs ☐ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs ---{ ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☑ 7 ☐ 8 ☐ 9 ☐ 10
• gamedeal user

  Feb 24, 2023

  I'm giving a thumbs up knowing that this game is not for everyone. It's a niche model train game that simulates the economics of running both passenger and cargo trains. It also includes ground, air and ship transport class vehicles. This review will sound mostly negative but I do enjoy playing the game. If played properly (whatever that really means to the individual player) the game can be difficult in the early stages. Once the player is operating with an annual positive profit paying off the company debt is easy. At that point in the game it becomes very difficult to fail, money concerns disappear shortly thereafter and the economic challenge is gone. From that point going forward the object of the games becomes making an aesthetically pleasing map. "Running" an airline is included in the game. In this there is little challenge. It's too simple. You build at least two airports, make an air route, buy a plane, transport passengers or cargo to the airport and fly the same to the other airport. The scale, however, is completely wrong and just doesn't go well with the base game. A large international airport is at least as large as the entire city it is serving. Modern wide body jets are, given the scale,almost 1000 feet long and wide. The largest maps available are, again given the scale, only 10 kilometres apart. In the real world one could ride a bicycle from one city to the other and beat a jet transport aircraft if the distance is only 10 km. I rarely set up airlines because of poor scaling. Ships are a lot closer to being true to scale. Here's where the aircraft scale is wrong. A 1000' long container ship is the same length as a Boeing 747. Shipping cargo by sea does work well. This is a strong point of the game when you've used trucks to transport raw materials to a rail head, transported the materials by train to a manufacturing plant, loaded the manufactured goods back onto a train and dropped it off at a sea port. You then transport the goods by ship to a far away harbor to be consumed in that city or have it distributed to one or more additional cities. Making that work well is satisfying and fun. If you can ignore that the game has some clunkyness in its menus, it can be a bit finicky with placing tracks and bridges, accept that the AI can easily become confused while routing trains over complex track layouts if you make edits to the track configuration and also accept airplanes are monstrously large the game can be fun. As said up front, it is a niche genre that isn't for everyone.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 30, 2023

  I had hoped this was a new Railroad Tycoon 3. It's not, but it's worth it. RRT3, in my opinion, had probably one of the best economic simulations of any transport-business tycoon game, an order of magnitude, maybe two, better than Transport Fever 2. The simple factor of "cargo moves on its own, just slower" was not only realistic, RRT3 maps had built-in competition and incentive. TpF2 (and many, many other games of this type) are more "sandbox" than "tycoon"-- there's a business aspect, but there's no stock market and no real mechanism to counter a player's network once it's even moderately-developed, keep hauling passengers and keep printing money. The government will never start a highway-building program, no competitors will ever challenge you, keep the bottom line reasonable and you'll quickly get to a 250M+ company. So it's kind of a sandbox. Fine. It's a gorgeous sandbox for this type of game, pixel art and isometric is its own thing, but the world here looks fantastic. I like trains, everything else is just a means to get more passengers and cargo on the trains so I can run big trains and make stupid money while I watch the trains go by. The vanilla trains are all totally acceptable and most look nice at full zoom, steam locomotives have animated valve gear and the stock sounds are alright. The workshop has tons of content for free (if your machine can handle it) that's often more detailed and interesting; like Cities: Skylines, if you haven't tried some of the workshop stuff, you're missing out on half the game. It's really clear that this was based on something that was mostly centered around trains (Train Fever, plays... OK but still looks fine), the track construction system is one of the better I've used in a 3D environment, and is intuitive but powerful. Vehicle management and timing is critical to success, and the vehicles handle realistically enough to believe. This forces the player to think about train lengths, track geometry, signal placement, etc. Signals are not as overwhelming as some Simutrans variants (although I love me some signalling) but have enough complexity to add interest. After maybe an hour and a half of working with it, you can understand the UI and where everything is, and be building railroad lines. That's not to say other vehicles are half-baked; the ships, planes and road vehicles are also well-modeled and great to look at and you could just as easily play this game as an airline builder sandbox as you could a railroad builder sandbox. The biggest disappointment (and one that can be, somewhat, "fixed" with various workshop mods) is the lack of complexity in the economy. You ship the same six finished products to cities and none of them require special handling beyond the vehicle type. There is no postal system. There is no stock market. There is no local government. Industries pop up randomly, there are no "mining regions" or "growing regions" or "manufacturing regions" like in real life (or RRT3). City buildings are the only attractions for passengers (no monuments/special attraction buildings) and the area of the stations is large, making developing feeder networks quick but simplistic. You never face any real competition, as mentioned. Your maximum loan is a fixed amount, you can run a company with a couple billion in assets and tens of millions in annual income, and you have the same maximum loan as a company totally in the red for its entire existence. The campaign feels decidedly like an afterthought and is pretty uninspired compared to RRT3. Haul enough of this here and you win, and some of the goods are re-skinned. Most of the campaign has very little in the way of financial constraints and you can do whatever you want with very little challenge. You have no real incentive to build thoughtfully because the missions are meaningless and arbitrary, and you'll be on to the next scenario (which is fundamentally the same as the one you're playing) in a few hours anyway. I made it to Era 3 before I got bored, the free game is way more interesting since the campaign is really just a re-skin of the free game. The campaign soundtrack, though, is a JAM, and the campaign would be much more worth playing if you could unlock the tracks for the free game by completing a mission (yes I know you can copy and paste the files). The soundtrack overall is way better than most, up there with RRT3, and that matters when you're going to spend a few hundred hours listening to it while you're building tracks. It's not "old west railroad music" with harmonicas and banjos like RRT3, but it's funky and chill at the same time, so it sticks in your head the same way. Not really a point to recommend the game, since the game is good enough on its own, but it's very nice icing on the cake. So is this a new RRT3? No. It's considerably simpler in some important ways; both the economy/environment as a whole, and in the engagement and cohesiveness of the campaign. These are the big things that give RRT3 its lasting charm, for me at least. The campaign here is less engaging and memorable than the soundtrack, where I can still remember some of the RRT3 campaign events from playing it 20 years ago. Is it better than RRT3? In a certain sense, yeah. It looks better and it handles more realistically, and the added diversity of vehicles adds some depth to the gameplay to make up. Considered on the campaign alone (which isn't really the point as much with TpF2 and was most of the point in RRT3), it's considerably worse. Considered on the basis of pre-rendered intro videos with Y2K-era CGI, RRT3 has that tied up. Buy it? Not a bad choice, but that's my opinion. Full price? If you like this type of game, you'll get your money's worth, the dev is active and makes meaningful updates to the core game. Sale? If you've ever played a business or management or tycoon-type game and liked it, yeah; TpF2 is easy to get into (unlike i.e. Simutrans, although I've got a couple-few thousand hours into that at this point) and looks great, while running pretty well on a lower-mid spec system at 720p, even on large maps. She chugs if you go megalomaniac-size map with a few hundred vehicles, but it's a lower-mid spec system and I'd expect this. Still runs playably 98% of the time. TL;DR: Well done as it is, would recommend. Could become truly excellent and a future classic with some minor improvements, and might well get there.