RAILWAY EMPIRE
Having a rail of a time
Trains, eh? Who doesn’t love a good train? The smell of the oil, the feel of a ticket in your hand, the thrill of repeatedly checking the board to work out why it hasn’t turned up yet… Okay, so maybe trains aren’t the first subject I’d choo-choo-choose for a game, but Railway Empire manages to deliver a toy-like pleasure through plonking down tracks and watching your locomotives chug their way across the American frontier.
Getting to that fun, however, can be a bit tricky. This is a complex game, which requires you to balance not just your own trains but the imports and exports of the towns they serve, and the stocks of your company and its competitors. This depth is welcome in a railway management sim, but many of these elements are unintuitive, or never properly explained. Setting up switches and signals so that trains can run on parallel tracks, for example, is infuriatingly fiddly. 1
If Railway Empire is a toy, it’s too often like the one you unwrapped on Christmas morning only to realise you need adult supervision to get it working. Push through that initial barrier, though, and you’ll find wonderful moments of peace, appreciating the delicate clockwork of something you constructed with your bare thumbs. Zooming right down to ground level and watching a slanted pillar of steam pull into the station of a tiny town you put on the map, horses and carts rattling through the streets. 2 It’s like playing with God’s own model train set – then the moment is over, and it’s straight back to managing freight, hiring conductors and engineers, and playing the stock market. Alex Spencer