If you have never played any of the other Railroad Tycoon games and you think you might be interested in Railroads!, pick it up. You'll like it.
If you have played one or more of the older ones, here's a overview of what's different.
Micromanagement is largely gone. I see this as a good thing, though some may argue. Instead of having multiple small pieces of cities strewn around and having to strategically place your station to take advantage of the most resources, you can merely drive a rail through the middle of the city and the game will show the city "moving out of the way" of the railroad, to quote the tutorial.
I like this better as it gives you the feeling that your engineers and planners are basically just making it happen for you. Why would the CEO have to decide whose farm or tree he was going to bulldoze anyway? That's not exactly his job.
Farms, ranches, mines, etc work simlarly. You're either close enough to use them or you're not.
The game still keeps the same irritating 8 car limit all of the previous installations have. I don't know about you guys, but out here in Texas if you see a train with 8 cars that's a tiny train; not a fully loaded one.
Laying track is flat out awesome compared to previous games. Instead of having boring and totally unrealistic 'single track' or 'double track in exactly the same pattern as the single,' you now have the ability to put track pretty much where you've always though you should've been able to. Got a rail going from point A to point B with and just really want a train to be able to cross that track horizontally to get from point G to point R without tangling everything up in the middle? The game builds you a bridge that completely seperates the two lines. You can have up to three tracks coming into the same depot with an unlimited amount keeping trains in queue further back.
Angling the track is finally truly 3D. You can build it going pretty much any direction, no long limited north, south, east, and west.
The only caveat to this is that all track has to be connected in some way or another. I don't see this as a huge issue considering the new flexibility.
Train water and sand are no longer your concern either, which I think is GREAT. Also, upgrading from a depot to a station to a terminal gives better percentages of profits and speeds up loading and unloading as opposed to the player picking and choosing how to update their station. I'm not sure yet if I like that better. I kind of miss the stations being at least somewhat individual.
Graphics are pretty and smooth although on my dual core system with 1GB of RAM and a fairly modern PCI-E video card I did have to turn all the details way down to get it to run. I'm thinking the game probably needs to be patched to get rid of some memory sinks.
The sound is no better than it ever was. Actually I don't like the music as much as 3. At least 3 had some nice, blues-ey sounding original stuff. Most of the music in Railroads! is stuff like the Star Spangled Banner done in irritatingly shrill folk music style. Yuck.
The scenarios don't have nearly as much personality as the last ones did, just basically giving you a list of different scenarios to load and play as opposed to having a sort of order. I miss the continuity, no matter how sparse.
All things considered, the game is pretty good. It feels alot faster paced than any of the old ones and is definately prettier and less micromanagement based. I would say it's probably not quite as deep as the others, though it still does pretty well. I think a well-thought out expansion pack would do wonders.
Pick it up if you like Railroad Tycoon games, but don't expect it to "reinvent the series" as the website claims. If you have never tried a Railroad Tycoon game but like strategy and/or tycoon games in general, pick it up for sure.
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