Recent reviews by hed0rizer

This is a really nice little time waster, basically the Mini Motorways of the skies. Really like this a lot, it tickles both my problem solving and air travel fancies. My only main gripes are:

* The world map does not wrap around (so to fly from US Westcoast to Japan you need to go across Europe, you cannot cut across the Pacific);
* There is currently no way to visualize passenger flows. It would be great to be able to select two airports on the map and see the path that passengers will take.

Also it would be helpful if there was some sort of information in the game that lets players know exactly how passengers will calculate which route they take. Is it the geographically shortest? Is it the one with fewest "hops" in between? Is it the "fastest" route (slow plane on short path vs. faster planes on longer path)? What happens if there are two equally "good" routes?

Edit: Oh yeah, PLEASE add a pause mode that lets me do things while the game is paused and doesn't force the menu to pop up. When things get super busy it is necessary to have extra time to micro your airports and as of now that is not possible.

Oh well, where should I begin *sigh*
TL;DR: This could have been SO good. A less crappy Sid Meiers Railroads. Instead what we got is what feels like a feature-reduced version of Sid Meiers Railroads with revamped graphics and minimally improved gameplay. Buy when it's about half off (25$), right now not worth the full sticker price IMO.

I played through the campaign, and all I can say about it - it was a drag. The first two scenarios are okay, the last three are just super slow going and frustrating. The industries developing in a city make absolutely no sense unless you have the money to throw out and build an industry yourself, which you almost never have. Why would a city build a brewery when the nearest source of wheat is across the entire damn map? I could live with that stupidness if it were at least randomized, but it's not. Start the same map 20 times over and all the cities will build the exact same useless industries over and over again. It makes no sense. Historically, a city would have industries using resources that are at least moderately easy to come by. Nobody would build a sawmill in the middle of the desert. Except in this game that's perfectly fine!

The historical background was interesting though but this entire game is completely US based and pretty much lacks any sort of gameplay based on the 20th century. No gameplay in Europe, no European maps, no map editor as far as I can tell. Hence me calling it a revamped but feature-reduced Sid Meiers Railroads.

Speaking of which, let me shamelessly compare Railway Empire to Railroads:

+ Better graphics and production value
+ Slightly improved gameplay (2 stations per city, being able to cross AI competitors rails)
+ Campaign feels more "epic" as you have a huge goal to achieve
+ More interesting and sophisticated tech tree
+ Historical background made the playthrough more interesting

* Cities don't only grow but can also shrink. I'm undecided on that one. In general, it makes gameplay more annoying than interesting, because when a city grows it usually builds new industry, and that industry will want stuff from somewhere across the entire map instead of something that is nearby, which makes it hard to fulfill that citys demands, in turn causing it to dwindle again. Ugh.

* AI never uses realistic rail simulation. Well, I didn't either after starting the third campaign scenario as meeting the goals quickly turns from "a challenge" into plain being "annoying" due to the game seemingly enforcing the building of stupid industries in stupid places.

* Trains will automatically choose which carts to attach. That on one hand makes gameplay more easy, but also has a hidden stupidity to it. There seems to be a strict priority of goods, eg. if there's 8 units of cloth and 8 units of corn, and your city demands both of these items, the train will still transport 8 units of whatever it deems more important instead of going 4/4 split. You CAN manually override that, like you'll have to do anyway in Railroads, but in this game trains run WAY longer distances on average, and having a train run empty or be delayed until it gets a certain number of carts going is about as big an issue as having a train which only carries stuff you don't need.

- Fewer Locomotives
- USA scenarios/maps only
- Campaign scenarios are too huge for their own good.
- Like I mentioned 239 times already: industries make NO sense in this game and really killed the fun for me.
- No map editor
- Absolutely nothing 20th century. You never leave the steam era in this game.

There's probably more that I can't think of right now, I just had to get this off my chest. I'm legitimately sad. This looked like a modernized more fully-featured Railroads, but it turns out it's about half the content of Railroads with some minimal gameplay changes that are half good and half bad. Meh. Unless there's a lot of free DLC coming out adding other continents and more modern engines - I cannot recommend it for the price they are asking. If anything, it made me want to play Sid Meiers Railroads again.