Railroad Tycoon 2

Developer: Poptop Software Publisher: Gathering of Developers System Requirements: OS: Win95/98 Processor: 166mhz Memory: 16mb Video: 1024x768 resolution capability Disk Space: 100mb 4x CDROM drive

I have enjoyed Railroad Tycoon 2 for several weeks now. It runs perfect on my system. This is a business simulation of sorts. I was at first wondering how I could possibly enjoy this game. Turns out, it's pretty fun.

You control nearly every aspect of your railroad in this game. You choose the destination of your trains and what cargo they will pick up. Cargo can be things like passengers, food, diesel fuel and steel. Each city on the game map has a supply and demand. Large cities will offer more passengers for transport and you can even place a dining car on your train to up passenger revenues. Any train can transport up to six loads of cargo on one trip. But as the tonnage of a train goes up, its speed goes down. Passengers may not weigh much, but coal does. Though this is a business sim you can in some way control the growth of cities. If a city has its needs met, over time it will develop more houses. Maybe even more industries. You're not out to grow cities in Railroad Tycoon 2, your goal is to make money and build your company. But, in reality railroads helped our cities grow and they did profit from it very much.

There is an interesting industry system in RRT2. A bakery may demand grain to create food. If you supply it with grain, you will be paid. You can then even ship the food it makes to another city which has a demand for food. Long distance transport will generally yield you more money as well as how in demand a resource is in a city. But some cargoes will go down with the time it takes to deliver them. Industries and cities like fast deliveries. So, though you can load a train down with 6 cars and make one bulk delivery it may not always be a good idea to do so. Several trains loaded with fewer cars can do the job just as well and though every train has fuel costs, getting the cargo there quickly can boost your income. There are quite a number of resources in the game as well as finalized products. The player's company can even purchase the coal mine the is selling the coal to the steel mill and make extra cash. Some industries will have higher profitability than others and the game is kind enough to tell you what companies would make a good investment.

There are many trains in Railroad Tycoon 2, of course. Each performs differently. Some trains are built for speed but perform terribly on grades (slope, like a hill) while others may chug along very slowly but manage to keep a good pace when going over mountains. As the manager of your company it is up to you to choose what train will go what route. And you are the builder of that route. Laying rail is pretty easy and numbers appear above track to let you know what grade % the ground is at its location. In this way you can make small adjustments and bypass hills or even mountains to make your route shorter for your trains.

Some scenarios will have you trying to be the sole surviving railroad and it is difficult to do this without some dabbling in the stock market. There are 18 scenarios of varying difficulty in Railroad Tycoon 2. The first level simply tells you to connect your rail to another town. This is pretty easy, but you must first make some money by running passengers between the nearby cities. Then, the game offers you a silver or gold medal if you can connect to a second or third specified city. This is cool because you may only get a bronze on a level but it's recorded. You can go back and try any scenario again easily. Gold medals can be hard to achieve but I enjoyed the challenge. In other scenarios you may be called to do things like raise your personal wealth, increase your company's book value or even transport teddy roosevelt to as many cities as you can in two weeks. There is a nice variety here, and if you fail a scenario you can choose to move forward to the next. The game wants you to at least try the scenarios in order.

There are a couple things I found slightly annoying like trying to get multiple cargoes from various cities to deliver to another city and having each of them gobble up the cargo when it arrives. This can be avoided by using multiple trains but rail congestion around cities can get really bad when you have to do this. Otherwise, I enjoy this game and am going to keep playing it. I'm suprised I had so much fun with trains. If you're shopping you can buy Railroad Tycoon 2 here.