I can't tell if this game is the design of Sid Meier or simply has his name on it as many games have in the past. But it doesn't live up to the quality of his previous titlles leaving me to believe it was for the marketing power of a giant's name, rather than his abilities.

The game has bugs, the system is broken, and the challenge is non-existent. The premise of the original game was simple: Build a railroad empire. When PopTop got their hands on Railroad Tycoon 2 they shifted emphasis away from this sandbox empire building and towards a structured objective based game. This was a mistake, in my mind, as the fun of RR Tycoon was best had in having to manage large sweeping empires of tangled railways, trying to find new resources and new routes before your opponents. For whatever reason Railroads! did not go back to its roots, and instead also focuses on this microcosm.

The real trouble begins in Railroads! with the scale. My memory from my youth is a little hazy, but I recall there being HUGE maps in the original, with the ability to start anywhere you’d like. It took decades in game to build a railway connecting east to west, not to mention huge capital. Railroads! on the other hand opted for this very odd combination of large areas with nothing in them. So while the map may cover the entire pacific northwest (the original divided the US into only two parts) or the entire mid-west, there are only a dozen or so cities, maybe only 3-4 of each industry, and so on. This was obviously done so you can build an empire in a short amount of time, and seeing as the scenarios are all fairly short, this is quite important. The problem is the game is no longer a “Where’s Waldo” search of finding new and profitable routes and planning complicated time tables. It’s been reduced down to ridiculously simple.

Simple is not always bad, but it sure is when it describes the AI. Simple. Granted, I was quite a bit less experienced in gameology when I played the original Railroad Tycoon, but I NEVER was able to achieve the highest rank at retirement. In fact, there were quite a few games where my company didn’t even finish first; and this wasn’t even the highest difficulty setting. The first game of Railroads! I picked up, I set to the second highest difficulty with the default number of opponents (3) and finished the scenario objectives 20 years before they needed to be. Start to finish in two hours.

Sure, the AI in the original RR Tycoon cheated like a 6 year old playing banker in Monopoly, but who cared!? It was hard, it was fun, it posed a constant threat, instead of being able to literally set the game on double speed for 30 minutes so it could finish on its own; given that I was dominating the game enough that nobody would ever catch me (and they didn’t). Oh yes, and how did I fair at retirement? How’s President of the United Stats sound? Yes, #1 rank in the game the first time I played.

What I'm saying here is that for those of you planning to buy this game, go buy a cheaper copy of Railroad Tycoon 2 or 3- or better yet, find a copy of the original. If this had come from any other developer I probably wouldn’t be so hard on it… but when you have the reputation of Sid Meier to uphold, this just doesn't come close to measuring up.