Railroad Tycoon III

Having been a fan of Transport Tycoon, an old title which is not supported by my current PC and which I found endlessly challenging I thought that this sounded like an ideal replacement. Not so. There are some interesting improvements on the old Transport Tycoon which make the game very much (too much) simpler from a management point of view.

I quickly mastered all the play levels in scenarios and challenges. Most are OK, though one or two were decidedly boring. None lasted very long and many can be won simply by good industry management and the minimum of track laying.

I have to say that the graphics are good, but not excellent, there is far too much whiting out of trains and buildings. Buildings are an amorphous white most of the time which makes spotting and selection of industries to buy very tedious. Once track is laid and trains running smoothly there is little to do but watch the clock and keep an eye open for industries you own which may be becoming unprofitable.

My real quibble though is - Just what do you do with this once the set tasks have been completed? There is a map editor, but, once you have developed your own scenarios, which is very time consuming, playing them is pretty unchallenging. You already know what to expect! Whatever happened to the random map generator which gives a good and different game every time.

Then there are the crashes!!!!!! Oh boy, this game just can't cope with more than about 100 trains and industries. I say about, because you are never warned about too many items in the game, it just crashes out on you. Smaller, older slower trains seem to run OK but, as you upgrade the chance of a crash increases. One crash even deleted all my track, trains and industry so that when I loaded the auto save there was nothing there. Once a crash has occurred I find that returning via the auto save is usually a waste of time, it just crashes again.

No, I'm not male and no, I'm not a train fan.

The reason I love the game is its complex mixture of managing the company, the trains, the industry around it and the stockmarket. This coupled with great game play, endless numbers of scenarios and campaigns, and ability to set the difficulty level to your own ability.

With this in mind, I eagerly awaited the release of Railroad Tycoon 3 with its all singing and dancing 3D graphics and claims that it is as stable as a rock (unlike SimCity 4).

I now can't help thinking of all the other things I could've spent my hard earned cash on......

From the outset the map is so dark you can hardly see the buildings, track and stations, even after cranking up the monitor to the brightest it can go. The buildings themselves all look a bit grey and it is difficult to tell the different industries apart unless you zoom in so far you might actually be standing in that cow farm, or is it a coal mine? Once you do zoom in the graphics do improve significantly but it is very hard to get a broad overview of the region from an ant's eye view. I really hope my criticism proves unjusitifed but as yet I have tried everything to improve the visuals but to no avail.

The cargoes displayed at individual stations are also not as clear as in its predecessor, and for me the fact that you can set each train to automatically pick up the most profitable load each time significantly reduces the strategic element of the game - after all chosing the right cargoes to haul and to where, for me, is the main concept of the RailRoad Tycoon series.

The number of buildings available to build in stations is also simplified - no longer do you have to build warehouses, grain silos, post offices, telephone poles etc... to speed up your train service, it all seems a bit mundane now.

The trains also do not seem to be slowed down by going over gradients or round bends which decreases from the realism and gameplay of the previous versions.

On a positive note (yes there is one) - you can now follow each train in a sort of camera mode as they trundle along your tracks and they do look magnificant. I spent an entire 5 minutes admiring by little green steam engine and its four carriages of random goods that the computer had deemed the most profitable to carry between London and Portsmouth.

Perhaps I am judging this game unfairly and I shouldn't compare it to Railroad Tycoon 2 but play it on its own merits. Pretty difficult though when it is supposed to be a an improved sequel.

And what do I know, all other reviews I have read have been really positive - make up your own mind.

I forgot all about it for years and then saw RRTIII was upcoming. Great! I thought. But then, it's been a while since I was really turned on by a new game so would this one disappoint too? I was keen to see so broke my own rule of never buying a brand new release.

And was I disappointed?

No!

Great graphics and a brilliantly designed map interface. Choose how closely you want to manage your trains - leave it on auto or make every cargo decision if you want. The best stock market sim anywhere outside of Capitalism II. And a totally brilliant map overview of resources that not only shows where they are produced and used but how each cargo in the world is moving. And cargoes do move. They moved before trains and they do here, mostly up and down rivers and coasts but also slowly across country - when it's flat enough. Watch as your factories and railways change the patterns of supply and demand.

There are 4 major Campaigns and stacks of Scenarios. And the map/scenario/campaign builder is the best I've seen anywhere. It begins with choosing your map from the real topography of the whole world and goes on from there. So when you've finished the (estimated) 60 hours of game play provided you can DIY to your heart's content.

Overall then? Well it's early days yet but this one looks like a real keeper - right up there with Civilization and SimCity.