For a 79 yr old this game is both stimulating and stress free. Like the concept cant wait for sandbox. Yes I failed missions but mostly my own fault. Have one minor complaint. Whilst i like the idea of a starting station I do hate having to send engines on a two day hike before they get started. Could we not have the opportunity to purchase another engine shed? say at a level 5 upgraded station for ,maybe $20K.
This game is one of the best rail games I have purchased (being an ex railway man I have a few) Does it have simularities to other rail games? Yes. But it has it's own identity well worth a try.

great for laying track, bad for managing trains. no multi train depots, not double track, no way to control trains at junctions. 1 train will wait 1 mile away from station for a train 400 miles away. its not a train game if i can't manage the trains.

I now completed half the campaign and still cannot decide whether I hate this game, or love it. The biggest issue for me is no signaling AT ALL. You have to rely on AI to distribute your trains over the railway, and that is something which sometimes brings trouble.I was actually shocked at first to see that there is absolutely no way how to tell your trains how to move, when, which part of the track they should use, etc.. I almost uninstalled the game twice thanks to that. I cannot remember any other transport tycoon game in which there was no signalling. Recent Transport Fever 2 has signals, Railway Empire has signals, Maschinky has signals..

I am a long time player of Railway Empire, another train management game which I love, and that game is far superior thanks to signalling alone. I experimented a bit with track layout, tried double tracking, or just doubling small parts of the track, etc, and so far I was not able to find a solution how to make trains move without some of them standing and staring and doing nothing, despite having a lot of free track ahead of them which they should have been using .. Fortunately, as soon as you learn game mechanics, you start making so much money that you stop caring about half your trains not being effective at all.. but that is hardly any positive.

However, devs seem to be tweaking AI train management and it improved a lot since release. So it is becoming less of an issue with each patch.

I would definately recommend the game, as it has big potential.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this game at this stage. It's a mile wide and a couple inches deep. By that I mean, while there are plenty of interesting options such as issuing bonds, a labour force etc, those options are not fully fleshed-out and so they are lifeless and robotic.

The other big problem is that this game doesn't know what it wants to be. It's not a route-builder... stations are always placed in the middle of a city and the city instantly rebuilds itself to make room around that station. So not a lot of tough "oh, that city is going to be tough to access"-type decisions.

But it's not a company management game either... passengers simply line up at a station and are willing to go anywhere, so where to build the next line is not a matter of managing passenger expectations, just a simple cost/benefit analysis. The law system has the potential to be interesting, but the laws are just time-based adjustments to revenue (up or down) which expire after a certain amount of time. Great, you get 10% more revenue for passengers for the next 190 days....but so what? The "lobbying system" too is a disappointing execution of a good idea. Always lobby for laws that help you and against ones that hurt you. Period. There are no trade-offs to consider; no dirty politics to employ. Just obvious moves.

I also take issue with the "research tree". Are we playing the role of a railroad company here or are we playing the role of a scientist? In order to obtain a new and better train, we must spend time and resources "researching" it... which doesn't make a ton of sense if we are a "Railroad Corporation" as the name suggests. Even putting that aside for a moment, again the decisions are bland. Do we research an engine upgrade that saves us 5% on fuel costs but costs $4200 to research? Well, that's easy to answer: Will it save you more than $4200? If so, yes. If not, no. There are no tradeoffs - just a simple calculation required.

I've played a lot of railroad simulations - this one has potential but if this is the full release, it's lacking. I hope to be able to recommend this game in the future.

I'm a long-time player of Railroad Tycoon II and III, and of the two recent takes at the same theme, Railroad Corporation and Railway Empire, I like Railroad Corporation more. Do I like it more than RT2/RT3? Eh.... probably not, but after 15+ years of waiting for a proper successor, it's the closest I've found.

At a high level, it combines the free-form track building of RT3 with the economic engine of RT2. Goods only move if they're hauled on your train, and buildings requiring source goods produce nothing without the railroad. Unlike RT2, there is a delay to their production in Corporation, so you'll have to make some tweaks if you don't want your trains to be waiting around for the steel mill to make steel with its newly arrived components.

Some reviewers prefer Empire because it requires you to build signals. I prefer Corporation because it doesn't; it focuses on the tycoon aspects rather than being a signal-builder game. For the most part, you lay track, trains figure out where to go. But double track helps, and you can optimize things pretty well by building some connections between tracks and optionally setting directionality, allowing a fast train to overtake a slow train, for example. I find Corporation strikes the right balance - it doesn't get bogged down in the signal details, while being slightly more in-depth in that area than the Railroad Tycoon games. If there were routing issues on release in 2019, I didn't see them during the entire campaign in 2023, so consider them fixed.

Corporation also benefits from not having the cartoonish cast of characters in Empire who constantly interject verbally. Once again, it lets you focus on building a railroad, only occasionally interrupted by an auction for a property, a somewhat interesting alternative to simply being the first one to click "buy" on a property in Railroad Tycoon.

The campaign scenarios can be moderately challenging, but like the Tycoon games, are designed with required and stretch goals; I didn't meet all of the stretch goals. I found the campaign to be fun in the beginning and after the mid-ground reset, but while somewhat fun, the research felt a bit artificial (just because you start a new company in 1860, you're stuck with 1830 locomotives? I'm sure Baldwin will sell you a new one). And by the end, I'd figured out the game, there are only so many supply chains.

That, combined with the limited set of scenarios, and the pre-set maps (versus the randomly-generated-buildings-based-on-weights method of RT2/RT3), ultimately limits the game's replayability. By the time Railroad Tycoon II reached Platinum, it had well over 100 scenarios covering all time periods and geographic areas, and both RT2 and RT3 have vast third-party scenarios on the Hawk and Badger Railroad website. Here, you've got about a dozen in the campaign, a couple more standalone, 5-10 that you can buy as add-ons, and not much in the workshop; there's a Germany map that looks interesting. I suspect PopTop had a much larger team and budget than Corbie did, but the modding capabilities of even RT2 are far superior. Thus, while I've played hundreds of hours of each of the Railroad Tycoon games, I don't know if I'll ever reach 50 in Corporation.

The 32 hours I did play were a nice change of pace though, and I look forward to seeing what Corbie can do in Railroad Corporation 2, in the 20th century. They've got the fundamentals down for a full successor for Railroad Tycoon, they just need the time and funding to polish the edges, build out the content library, and make the still-in-beta modding tools better in the next version so the community can more easily help with the latter.

Pro: nice graphics, not overloaded, great music score, no annoying cartoon characters with Mickey Mouse voices (you know who you are). Many cute tiny details. Most of the initial problems (like the mildly retarded pathfinding) have been sorted out in recent updates.

Con: Static maps - play again, same thing. only the rotation angle of your initial station varies... LOL
Frustrating difficulty progression - while many of the Chapter 1 missions are very easy, Chapter 2 suddenly is a total turn-off because of virtually unsolvable scenarios. Of course there are solutions, but those are not discovered by logic and often do not make sense - you have to find that one route that is a cash cow, or it is over.

Overall: while it is a nice "in between" game I have pretty much given up on it, the later scenarios are too annoying. Did not buy the DLC either. With better balancing and more logical map design ("You can start with our furniture factory" - yeah great, textile and lumber are just at the other edge of the map, haha) it would be my favorite railroad sim. As is - not worth the money.

This game lacks many of the things that Syd Meirs' Railroad Tycoon considered and got right over a decade ago. The maps are not dynamic, which really sucks because it's always the same cities with the same commodities, and the same terrain. Replay for the most part is uninviting. The bidding for land and buildings in entirely predictable. Hit the higher bid button three times and you'll win the bid.

The graphics are great although I experienced significant lag when I increased the detail levels of water and trees. My graphics card has handled far more complex rendering so I'm certain this is a poor memory management issue with the developers. The tutorials are relatively useless.. Fortunately, there are enough players who answered most of the questions I had.

Still, with those limitations I still found it chellenging and enjoyable to play. I didn't play with the time limit options. I found some of the time frames to be absurdly short or the game balancers thought that players should know the quest solutions. That took away a lot of the fun for me but without the time limits I was free to build my empire and then meet the challenges with less risk of having the game terminate because I was overdrawn at the bank.

The game's not worth full price but $15 to $20 would buy you a lot of fun.

Way over simplified gameplay. Reminds the First Railroad Tycoon. Only few old trains and only 3 of them are worth researching and upgrading. Maintenance takes unreasonably too much time and too much money. Do not bother repairing trains, just replace them when the condition drops below 50%. It might seem like it costs more, but by avoiding train's down time you will make way more money than the cost of the replacement. The trains can't run with empty cars if no load available at the moment, that's a problem and you are forced to micromanage trains load schedule. Very few missions in the game. Inside the game there is not much to do. It's takes only 20 seconds to neutralize your competitors at the beginning of a scenario, so I didn't even get to play against AI in any of the missions. The game is just too simple and not complicated at all. If you take Railroad Tycoon 3 and cut it down by 80% and improve the graphics and this is the game you will get. I'd recommend this only for people who have no experience with economy games. I finished the whole game and I got to say that this game is pretty boring. Probably the biggest reason for being boring is that everything is perfectly predictable and on the schedule. The game always goes the same way and if you figure out the strategy for this game you instantly become the god of the map and you will have so much money in the account that you wouldn't know what to do with it. After that most scenarios become nothing but a little bit of set up in the beginning and a simple waiting game for the time to pass while the goal is being achieved. I spent quiet a bit of time at maximum game speed to avoid excessive waiting and a whole lot of nothing happening. Pause it as changes are needed to be made and back to maximum speed. I played this game for 2 weeks, finished it, and I won't play it ever again.

Unplayable as is, 2 main issues have stopped me playing,

1, (unforgivable in a train sim) NO signals, not a one, your only option is to double track, or at least put sidings along the track, but the trains may or may not like them and end up sitting in the station.

2. there is a £50k overdraft limit, the instant you hit that its game over, and unfortunatly you have to buy your train cargo, if you don't have enough then it wont buy and sit in limbo, but if buying the cargo puts you at -$49,999 it will, then 2 seconds later your running costs tick and its game over.

so you end up in a loop of game over load autosave and try to baby it to last long enough to make a profit, but all it takes is too many trains hitting a station at once and buying cargo aaaaand your dead again.

There are too many problems with the basic common sense of this game. For the current cost of the game it definitely isn't worth it. Maybe give it while before purchasing. or Buy Railway Empire - which isn't perfect, but it's a lot more enjoyable. Or better yet, go with Transport Fever 2. This is a great game. Needs some mods, but still great. I definitely regret paying the crazy amount they wanted. Here are some things that really take away from enjoying this game.

1. you can *only* buy new trains from your original station. this means do not even bother trying to create a long network of stations. They don't plan on changing this (Wtf?). This wouldn't be as huge a problem if it wasn't for several of the issues identified in this list.
2. If you reduce the QTY of goods on a train route but the train already has more cargo it won't just unload the reduced amount and keep that extra - like in reality. It will just go back and forth between stations with all the cargo until you go and re-add the reduced amount, or manually delete the cargo.
3. your upkeep cost doubles if you hit a specific QTY of trains or stations. Why? Yes good Q. This makes no sense.
4. If you add a new line coming off a one way track, sometimes it will automatically switch the one way part (between the station and new track) to a two-way path, and sometimes it wont....not sure why. Really annoying when you find out your new train has been sitting in your original station for 10 mins because of this little doozy.
4a. When it does choose to change part of the track to two way, sometimes it just decides to make a random segment two way (like a bridge, but not the ground after the bridge) - which is really intuative and well thought out.
God so many more. ugh. These are all things that shouldn't be in a $50 game. These are all silly, small, things that should very easily be fixed.
5. There's fullscreen or windowed. No borderless window (again - this makes no sense)
6. If you alt-tab during loading of a game it stops working and you have to force-close the game. Isn't that fun?
7. Want to set your dual railway to one way each? Sure - first click one of the tracks then the other...but we'll make the second track random - so it won't automatically default to the opposite direction to the one you first chose...
8. Talking of tracks...do you like your tracks to require minute micro management to make sure the dual tracks stay together? no? neither does anyone - but that's beside the point. Play the game, and you'll soon see what I'm talking about.
9.Did you fail the mission and want to retry? Well click that retry button and we'll put you on a loading screen that says "Restarting Mission". This loading screen won't go anywhere, and you'l eventually have to force-close the same and restart it.

November EDIT: Since making this review in April, I can't see any patch notes that fix any of the actual bugs, or game improvements to fix the failed designs.
What I have seen is that they have released several DLCs...

Generally when a company CBF fixing their game, but instead are focused only on releasing new paid content, you probably shouldn't give them your money.