Railroad Tycoon 2 Gold

It isn't easy. Those pretty trains chugging across the bucolic landscape have to be maintained, repaired, and replaced regularly or you run the risk of experiencing an expensive breakdown or crash. As the years tick by you must also adapt to historical demands. New industries spring up while others become less important. The passenger and mail routes that generate so much cash at the beginning of the game don't even cover your expenses once the automobile steals the show. The availability of new trains (the game models over 60), the fact that demands wax and wane over time, and the inclusion of a fully functioning stock market simulation that allows for hostile takeovers add up to a game where players always have something to do.

This Gold version of the game includes both the original Railroad Tycoon 2 and the expansion pack Railroad Tycoon 2: The Second Century along with 12 bonus scenarios and an electronic version of the strategy guide. It's enough to keep fans of business simulations and strategy games occupied for months. --T. Byrl Baker

Pros:

• Accurate yet fun business elements
• Always something to do
• Nice graphics and a terrific blues soundtrack

• Micromanaging cargoes may be too tedious for casual gamers

The opening footage to Railroad Tycoon 2 implies that some gnarly train wreckage is on your way. Indeed, the game has some beautiful trains, puffing and zipping their way through impressionist landscapes. Tragically, one can only deliberately crash a train by failing to properly maintain it. A destroyed train is a solitary event (no impact with another train), and instead of car after car piling up after the train has fallen off the tracks, the destroyed train sits on the track -- blocking traffic -- and then disappears in a puff of smoke. What a letdown!

Mind you, this is about the only way that Railroad Tycoon 2 has fallen down. It is highly customizable, and it is graphically beautiful. It comes with a challenging campaign and dozens of scenarios. The map editor allows for some sophisticated rendering of real landscapes taken from satellite data. Dozens of scenarios are available on the Internet, so this investment might be one of the best entertainment values out there.

There is increased flexibility in the corporate financial model, and some of the AIs are truly vicious, but you can simply turn them off in the scenarios. Even if you can't play smash-'em-up with the trains, there is plenty of havoc that you can wreak as you try to crush the economic dreams of your opponents and, of course, the thousands of railroad employees working for you.


A great challenge and lots of fun   November 28, 2001
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Railroad Tycoon II is a great strategy game that requires critical thinking and lots of patience. If you possess both of these then RT2 is the game for you. In RT2 you are put in the seat of the chairman of a large railroad corporation, and you must expand your railroad across America, all the while maintaining a constant stream of revenue and profits. This entails starting profitable routes such as taking passengers & mail to various towns that demand them, and taking resources to industries that require them. For example, you would take coal and iron to a steel mill for it to produce steel, and then steel and grain to produce goods at a cannery. Establishing and maintaining these routes, and keeping them profitable at the same time, is a great challenge and requires constant micromanagement of train consists and the demands of your individual trains, such as their needing oil, sand or water.

It may sound technical, but RT2 is loads of fun. It's a great feeling to see your railroad start small, and gradually expand across America. You've got to run the game at a slow speed because there's so much to manage all at once, and so this expansion obviously happens quite gradually. But it's tremendously rewarding. Added to which, you must manage your own personal finances on the stockmarket. This feature detracts a little from the railroad side of things, but the two are interlinked in that if you run your railroad well, the price of your stock skyrockets. Concomitant with the stockmarket is the state of the economy: it follows a cycle that influences your company's profits, aggregate demand in the economy, and hence your price of stocks. You've got to factor all of this in when managing your personal wealth, and so you must buy low, sell high, issue stock at the right time, issue bonds, and raise or lower dividends depending on boom or recession. It's quite a complex procedure but, if you do it right, you can see your personal wealth skyrocket. Added to which, certain missions are won by you actually attaining a threshold of wealth, and not by expanding your railroad from one town to another.

So ultimately, Railroad Tycoon 2 is a tremendously diverse and richly rewarding game. The presence of the stockmarket feature adds extra depth to what is already quite a complex game, and so it's suitable for critical thinkers and problem solvers. The hard difficulty provides a huge challenge (which I am currently undertaking), and the easy difficulty is challenging enough for novices. As a result, RT2 is suitable for anyone really, as long as you've got the patience to sit down and learn how to play it in the first place. One thing's for sure: it's well worth it.


entertaining and challenging   October 14, 2001
 0 out of 1 found this review helpful

The scenarios are a huge plus to this game, you can set a "sand-box" mode where you play in a vacuum or go all out and throw in shares and customer rating.

The middle levels are the most intriguing, but after you have completed 6 or so missions some of the sound files become a bit annoying.

Prepare to mix up some sand...great for kids as well as adults.


RailRoad Tycoon   September 27, 2001
A great game with with good graphics. Pick any city in the world to start with! Also some made-up maps. You can make your own maps by using the map editor.


RailRoad Tycoon   September 27, 2001
 1 out of 2 found this review helpful

A great game with with good graphics. Pick any city in the world to start with! Also some made-up maps. You can make your own maps by using the map editor.