Railroad Corporation has been in early access for a few weeks and so far it’s failed to pick up steam. It bills itself as a railroad empire management simulation, promising you the opportunity to find your fortune by transporting goods across the 19th century Midwestern United States. In practice, however, the game is little more than a tedious puzzle game with only slight management elements. It currently only features a very basic campaign that offers little persistence between missions. Furthermore, the pace at which the missions unfold and the trial and error nature of them makes for a tedious experience. It’s possible some of this could be alleviated by the promised “Sandbox” mode, however, I do no believe this will solve all of the game’s issues.
The goal of each missions in Railroad Corporation is to transport different types of resources around by building tracks and plotting routes for your trains. You want to maximize profits, so you need to be as efficient as possible. Trains and tracks are extremely expensive, so it’s important that you only place tracks when you must and that each train carries it’s weight. You also need to be concerned about train upkeep, fuel cost, and employee salaries. In short, your company is constantly bleeding money and you must inch your way into the black with every decision you make. The high initial costs and shoe-string budget of most missions means you will most likely have to restart several times before you figure out the best path. This kind of trial and error means the game leans more towards puzzle solving rather than simulation or management.
There’s very little management outside of ensuring your trains are loaded and heading to the right destinations without breaking down. Over the course of a mission destinations may demand different goods at different times, but it rarely effects your overall game plan. This is because the cost of new tracks is so expensive that plotting a new route is rarely economically feasible. There’s also the issue how darn slow your trains move. A typical mission will give you a very specific objective to complete in a relatively short amount of time. You may think 500 days is plenty of time to deliver 6 loads of coal to Nashville, but once you realize how slow early 19th century trains were, all of a sudden one stop can mean failure to meet your deadline. I had many missions where I spent almost an hour delivering goods only to fail at the last possible minute because time ran out.
Because each mission kind of exists in a vacuum, you never get the feeling like you’re building your own railroad empire. You do earn experience points that you can spend between missions to unlock permanent upgrades like less expensive tracks and faster technology research, but that’s all the carries over. Each mission starts you off with 0 trains, a predetermined budget, and a very specific goal that doesn’t allow for much in the way to experimentation. This may be rectified with an endless “sandbox” mode that let’s you build however you want, but even that won’t solve the laborious pace of the whole thing. Most missions require you to sit and watch trains perform the same tasks for 10-15 minutes just so you can earn enough money to build your next set of tracks. There is currently no way to speed up the gameplay for these segments. This is mostly do to the fact that you must monitor the health of your trains and repair them before they break down. Which is just another elements that feeds into the maintenance cost of it all.
I did find some satisfaction in completing some of levels. However, that satisfaction was derived only after I came to terms with what Railroad Corporation actually is rather than what it says it is. Even then, the satisfaction did not outweigh the frustration I felt every tine I had to restart halfway through a mission. And it was never satisfying watching my trains slowly crawl their way across the map, just to miss that crucial delivery at the last possible second. As it stands, Railroad Corporation is difficult to recommend, but I will jump back in when they add in the sandbox mode to see if that rectifies some of my complaints.
