Railway Empire 2

Stained by DLC greed.

Definitely my favorite game of the "railway management" genre. I mean this as a compliment - it had significantly fewer frustrating moments than any other game in the genre I have played (I've played games in the genre since the original Railroad Tycoon). I really only had two major issues with it. The first is that I disagree with how the developers defined train route paths. I would rather the trains pick their path by looking at the start point, looking at the end point, and choosing the path that gets them between the two in the quickest time. Instead, the game seems to look at the train's current point, then to look at the next intermediate point, and choose the path that is the shortest distance between those, even if it significantly increases how long it will take to get to the end point. I tried to work around that as much as possible by only having one possible path from start points to destinations, but that wasn't always possible. I would sometimes notice my trains going through a series of stations that they had no reason to even approach, weren't in the list of stations I had defined, and took way longer than the way I defined. The second issue was that the game becomes hilariously bad at laying a parallel track next to your own existing track as soon as the track laying window is closed. It does it nearly perfectly when you do all the tracks at the same time before closing the window. But when you want to add them later, it has absolutely no idea how to do parallel tracks there, adding in unnecessary bridges and tunnels and creating unworkable inclines. It only takes moments to manually create track points to make the new parallel tracking work, but it was annoying to have to do it when the game clearly could do it properly. Other than those things and some tedium in the "connect everything together" type of achievements, I had a great time. I'm at somewhere over 280 hours played through the base game and the 4 current DLC. I completed all the scenarios and got all the achievements. I'm looking forward to the next DLC and I'll definitely be buying that and coming back to play the game some more. The game makes a lot of things super easy compared to other games in the genre, including adding trains to existing routes, crossing tracks over existing tracks, switchbacks, etc. I spent way more time thinking about what I wanted to do than actually mechanically doing it. I experienced a couple of crashes, but the autosaves work great and I barely lost any time. There is a nice variety of time periods and trains available. I generally preferred playing in the earlier time periods because the challenges were more interesting. A lot of the later scenarios involve producing steel in some capacity. My friends and I jokingly called the game Steel Production Simulator because of that. The graphics in the game are good for the genre, but to me the most beautiful graphic in the game is the little symbol that shows that iron and steel aren't available in the current era. That little symbol almost always guaranteed a more fun scenario. I think the DLC are all among the best content in the game. All of them have long, elaborate scenarios. For me, they were a lot of fun to play because of that - it was nice to build up a large railway system over a large area and actually get to use it before the scenario ends. They all incorporate music local to the region and have some different resources that make things more interesting. My favorite by far is High Voltage. I love electric trains both in-game and in real life. Plus the scenarios in that DLC are very positive and a lot of fun. The India DLC is thematically very dark. If you enjoy the themes of games like Tyranny or you root for the Empire in the Star Wars movies, this is a great DLC for you. It is something pretty unique for the genre. I preferred Journey to the East over Bella Italia because of the specific scenarios, but Bella Italia seems to have a lot more content and is also the best looking content. There is a custom game system where you choose all of your difficulty variables to make the game easier or harder, choose your large or small region, and choose your timeframe, and the game gives you a random set of goals. There is also a sandbox mode. I didn't play those as much as the scenarios, but they are a great option to have. One thing I never thought I would want in a game like this is an online leaderboard. But, as it turned out, I really liked using it to challenge myself to see if I could improve my ranking in the various scenarios. The existence of the leaderboard made me a better player because I kept trying to make things more efficient as I played to get a higher score. Overall I definitely recommend it. I feel I got great value for my money and even the negatives mentioned didn't keep me from racking up hours playing.

This game showed a lot of promise when it initially came out. The customizable engines (to an extent). The massive maps...I was very excited for this. RE1 was a fantastic game I sunk hours into. I have with this game as well. But after multiple patches and DLC, I am putting it away. Below is why. - The latest patches have made the game unplayable in certain aspects to where you can't get anything to load. - There are items from RE1 that are or were blatantly missing from RE2. Manual track signals are probably the biggest of them. The devs launched the game without thinking it was unnecessary. Then implemented a poor version of what was in RE1. It is overly complicated and doesn't work in a lot of cases. You'll have trains teleporting back to their point origin constantly. - The United States map is poorly put together, particularly in the heartland. There are areas of mountains randomly on the map that shouldn't be there. Rivers are missing. Towns are placed incorrectly. Considering the devs had access to the RE1 maps as a reference point, it feels inexcusable for them to make such major errors. I have been told this is similar on the European map as well. Cities are in the wrong spots. Mountains are randomly placed. Rivers poorly placed or missing. It is just bad mapping. - The AI is bad. There really is no point in having them in a game as they are not competitive and not logical in their track & station building. - The logic for how engines are unlocked and how they compare to others is absurd. Particularly the Shay engines are incredibly fast. They would never run the speed this game alleges. They were used to haul freight down incredibly steep grades at a consistent speed, not operate as almost an express engine. - There are engines missing from RE2 that were readily available in RE1. Particularly Mikados stand out. Key major engines that should already be in the game are just missing. Inexplicably. - The rate of unlocking technology is hardcoded in such a way that it makes choices not really matter. In RE1 you could affect the rate at which you got research points and unlocked things. In this game, it is all a flat rate. It really eliminates any real strategy for this piece. Overall, I am disappointed with where this game as gone. There is a lot of promise here, but the things that draw away from it being enjoyable have gotten to be too much at this point. I've spent a good amount of money supporting these Devs for both RE1 and RE2. I don't expect I will do so further unless I see something change with some of these basic core items that have gone unaddressed.

The game has fundamental, unsolvable logistics issues. Once you try to manage high-volume goods, station throughput bottlenecks make it impossible to maintain 100% satisfaction. Furthermore, the lack of train AI for parallel tracking forces you to block entire rail lines just for a single resupply, turning what should be a complex logistics game into a frustrating experience with inevitable, broken bottlenecks.

Don't even bother with buying this game on devices with proton (Steam Deck, Desktop Linux). Developer doesn't fix bugs and glitches that make game totally unplayable. They are steamrolling on new DLC's to gather more money.

2024/12/28: Releasing the game in this broken state is atrocious. Pathfinding is broken, and unless they fix this the game isn't worth your time or money. Local trains work fine, but do anything a bit more complex, say one "lumber" line delivering lumber from one location to several cities (lumber -> London -> lumber -> Oxford -> lumber -> Dover etc.), the game essentially breaks, and you'll have trains travelling to places they're not supposed to.

As I continue to grapple with my midlife crisis, I hopped into yet another train game - Railway Empire 2. If Transport Fever is a modernization of TTD, Railway Empire is the modernization of Sid Meier's Railroads!, which itself was a modernization of the better Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon series. The problem with Sid Meier's Railroads! is that it simplified a lot of the minutia that originally made Railroad Tycoon so addictive. It was a good enough game but inferior to its predecessor, Railroad Tycoon 3. And so it is with Railway Empire 2. I remember liking the first version of the game. The track-laying mechanic is probably the best of any railway tycoon (genre) game I've played. Rather than laying tracks by segment, you're allowed to plan the entire line before committing to it, tweaking the path it takes along its length and seeing how it affects cost, speed, grade, whatever. I eventually lost interest in the first Railway Empire after 20-30 hours but was satisfied I got my money's worth. It's been long enough that I'm not sure exactly what I liked about the first one, but Railway Empire 2 seems to be missing it. It's got that same Kalypso-style personality that I absolutely love but creating routes is now an exercise in frustration. Either it was oversimplified from the first one or the first one's scenarios didn't require very complicated routing. At any rate, the game doesn't give you the control or information you need to plan multiple interconnecting lines, especially if you make the mistake of choosing the "auto-signal" option at the outset of the campaign. But at the same time, it only seems to auto-signal parallel lines. Imagine you're driving on the interstate but every time a car hops on the on-ramp, everyone else on the interstate has to stop and wait for them to merge. Also the on-ramp is several miles long. Conversely, the game has you manually placing certain structures and gridirons that I would consider inconsequential in a setting where even the layout of the cities is procedurally rearranged to make room for your railway as it plows through the center of town. It's a weird mish-mash of oversimplified and overcomplicated that doesn't seem to work. Laying tracks and planning lines is reminiscent of the simple joy of playing with model trains. But then having to manage utilization of those tracks, along with individual engine maintenance, upgrades, supply and demand, stocks and bonds, and research is much more akin to a deeper management game. Unfortunately, the game doesn't surface the information or authority you need to manage these things effectively. The end result is a tangled mess of rails and confusion over how your once-beautiful railway came to this. Play Transport Fever 2 instead.

The game is not bad until you try to merge tracks it is a nightmare. You fight for hours to merge tracks from one major line to the next just to get on the 8th line for it to give you an error that the last track cant be laid. It is unacceptable. If you can't make track merging easier, I think your game is a joke. I have enjoyed my playthrough until which time I needed to finally expand to full blown 8 line wide tracks which cannot be merge unless you get lucky. I am still trying to figure out why you released a game knowing of these issues that makes the game unplayable for people wanting to set up huge rail systems across a country. If you can't get the freestyle track construction tool to properly merge tracks why did you not use prefab merging track sections that a player could just pop down in the flow with snap points for each line leading in and out of the prefab.