Railway Empire Review

Off the rails

(This review is spoiler-free!)

          I like tycoon games quite a bit. I’m always up for a round of Zoo or RollerCoaster Tycoon, or any of their modern counterparts.

          Speaking of that, when is somebody gonna make a Zoo Tycoon spiritual successor on the level of Planet Coaster or Cities: Skylines? I’ve been waiting for that for years. Hopefully Jurassic World: Evolution will be good…

          Anyways, I was…intrigued by the prospect of Railway Empire. A train tycoon game didn’t sound particularly engaging to me, but several positive reviews left me interested to see what the game had to offer.

          I played it for about an hour and came to the conclusion that the only people who’ll truly get the most out of this game are true train enthusiasts. I’m glad they’ve got a modern game that’ll appeal to them, but for me Railway Empire was painfully boring.

          The game starts with you placed in wild western America with the mission of creating the best railway there ever was. You can connect various tracks and stations between different towns and try to get your trains to complete various objectives for you.

          I didn’t hate the presentation overall. The look of the game reminded me a lot of classic tycoon games of yesteryear, and that’s always fun. It doesn’t push the PS4 to its breaking point, but for a train building game that’s okay.

          But I do have an issue with the game being on the PS4. Typically tycoon-style games have stuck to the PC with how easy it is to tab out and do something else while your profits rise. Then you come back when you finally have enough money and start building new rollercoasters or animal exhibits again. With the PS4 this isn’t an option. Much like Birthdays the Beginning, this is a game that, despite having long chunks of time without much happening, requires you to put aside time to focus on it and it alone since you can only run one thing at a time on console. Sure, you can check your phone during the slow periods, but nobody plays video games for an excuse to look at Twitter halfway through.

          And, unfortunately to say, this game is pretty darn boring. You make stations at the various towns spread across the map, tie them together with railways, map out the route you want the train to take, and then watch ‘em go! …And then you wait for them to complete objectives for you. And the trains move really, really slow. And unlike Birthdays the Beginning there’s no time speed-up option, so you’re stuck waiting for the trains to get to where they need to be as they chug along.

          You can ride with the trains and blow the whistle though, so that’s kinda fun.

          While the controls worked fine, I actually found the game to be kind of unresponsive at times in terms of the presentation and why certain things were happening. Oftentimes rails just wouldn’t connect to stations to finish paths, and I’d have to resort to trial and error until finally it wanted to work.

          Let me tell you about what made me quit playing: The Great Corn Catastrophe. To finish a string of missions I had to tie two towns on separate sides of the map together with railways. Alright, simple enough. My next job was to ferry 20 pounds of meat to the new town on the opposite side of the map from the rest of my railway. I sent a train to the station I’d already established for resources, and after 10 minutes of watching him chug along (it even broke down at one point), he finally started on his way back…bringing corn instead of the meat I needed.

          In an attempt to fix this problem I created a new station at a resource that only supplied meat, but for whatever reason despite being scheduled and tied to the town I needed to deliver it to, that new train never moved from its starting position. ARGH!

          After this comedy of errors I checked out Freeform Mode to see if it would be more fun. I stared at the screen for about two minutes before realizing that building a massive railway wouldn’t be nearly as fun or rewarding as making the theme park or zoo of my dreams, and I turned the game off.

          Is Railway Empire a bad game? No. If you like trains, I think this one is worth giving a try. But for the rest of us, this game is way too slow, unresponsive, slow, boring, and slow to be enjoyable. Did I mention it was slow? ‘Cause it is. It’s really slow.

FINAL SCORE

4/10

Mediocre