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For those of you who either weren't around in the early 90s or just weren't playing at that time, Locomotion is a sequel to the original game, Transport Tycoon. Before playing Locomotion, I went back to Transport Tycoon to refresh myself so I could see what's changed. At first glance, the two games are very similar, but upon closer inspection some key decisions were made to differentiate this game from Transport Tycoon - whether for better or for worse are in the eye of the beholder.

The premise of the game is simple, build a transportation network and earn money by bringing cargo from areas that produce it to areas that need it. Cargo ranges from iron ore and coal to people and mail. Cargo can be turned into other goods, coal and iron turned to steel. Steel can be used to manufacture goods; those goods can then be taken to cities. Cities that receive goods grow faster and produce more people, which can then be sent to other cities. So, the great economic chain begins at the basic resources and slowly expands from there.

The game is divided into scenarios with five different difficulty levels, beginner, easy, medium, challenging, and expert. Each scenario has a win objective, such as achieving a company worth, transporting an amount of cargo, or completing various other tasks before a given year. This is the first, largest, and most important difference between Transport Tycoon and Locomotion. Transport Tycoon had no scenario; it was a randomly generated map where you would lead your company, using the exact same premise, from the early years of trains and trucks to the near future of high-speed jets and bullet trains. I can't help but feel this was a step in the wrong direction, no longer could you forge an empire to stand the test of time, instead you worked on your teeny little scenario to achieve an imposed objective. "But, wait!" you say. There is the 100 year challenge on expert mode. "Ah, yes, the 100 year challenge", I answer - where your objective is to achieve an income of 1 million dollars a month within 100 years. First of all, that is still a limited scope and secondly, I beat the 100 year challenge in 1933. I could have purchased, sold, and repurchased every living human being on that pathetic world if they had given me 67 more years of compounding interest!!!

This leads me to the next phase, challenge. While Transport Tycoon was somewhat difficult (mostly because the AI cheated all the time), Locomotion is ridiculously easy. How easy? Well, by my second day of play I had beaten my first challenging level. By day three I was on to tackling the "100 year challenge" which I would beat in 1/3rd the allowed time. That certainly wasn't "challenging" for me, let alone expert level challenging. If you are die hard empire builder, turn back, Locomotion would be nothing more than a fun game to rent for a week. However, if you really like the simpler tycoon games or are new to the genre, I really think you are the person Chris Sawyer was after with this one.

So, we've established that this game is of a much smaller scale and easier difficulty than Transport Tycoon, what else can we compare? Realism. Reality has no bearing in either game, which is my caveat. In both games if you had a coal mine next door to a power plant you could make MORE money transporting the coal across the entire planet to a different power plant with a coal plant next door than you could just buying locally. The amount of money you get is based on travel time and travel distance, meaning the longer the distance the more money you make. For most commodities, the prices over time don't fall very sharply and you find the real money is transporting unreasonable and illogical distances for big gains. Ok, that part hasn't changed, it started in Transport Tycoon and it is still a part of Locomotion.

What did change were bridges and tunnels. Most people would say demolishing an entire mountain range the size of The Rockies would be a "prohibitively expensive" venture. Building a bridge from Los Angeles to New York that hangs 244 ft. above the surface of the landscape is quite possibly "impractical." Not in Locomotion! I found it is best to play Locomotion like you are an incredibly eccentric, rich, old man or woman who has these crazy money making schemes. Building bridges of unreasonable length, demolishing entire mountains, or tunneling through entire continents not only becomes possible, it actually becomes the most REASONABLE thing to do! In Transport Tycoon the length of the bridge or tunnel was an exponentially increasing cost curve, so a bridge 100 hexes long was MUCH more expensive than two 50 hex bridges. Locomotion decided to change all that and make the cost fixed per square, meaning two 50 hex bridges are the same price as one 100 hex one. It seems the crazier the plan the more money I would make! Only ONCE in my eccentric plans did that fail to make me money, and that was my vain attempt to air transport cows from Ireland to South England. Who knew that flying cows across a map wouldn't make me even richer than I was already?

On the whole, the graphics are a vast improvement from the 1994 Transport Tycoon and the music is awesome! The AI improvement is unspeakably better as expected from the passing years. The game play is still fun, despite all the weird flaws, but I actually have decided I enjoyed playing Transport Tycoon a lot more than Locomotion. Given the differences in difficulty levels if you purchase Locomotion, I think it is a great step towards mastering Transport Tycoon. What I enjoyed most about this game was pretending I was a crazy old coot who may not have believed money could buy happiness, but it certainly went a long way towards demolishing entire towns, mountains, and my competition.