Review: Sid Meier's Railroads! is a fun and challenging look at a fascinating industry
More than 20 years ago, legendary game designer Sid Meier invented the “tycoon” genre of strategy games with Railroad Tycoon. Meier would go on to create the Civilization series, and Railroad Tycoon chugged along too—but without him, passed along to a different developer. Sid’s gone back to his roots, though, and decided to revisit the concept in a new game: Feral Interactive’s $30 Sid Meier’s Railroads!, now available for download from the Mac App Store and other locations.
The name may have changed, but this game’s pedigree as a Sid Meier title shows through. It’s a detailed strategy game that puts you in charge of a railroad, responsible for building the rails, transporting passengers, freight, raw materials, and finished goods.
If it stopped there, Sid Meier’s Railroads would be enough to appeal to a wide swath of fans—after all, how much fun is it just to lay out track and run locomotives? But that’s just the surface for Railroads. Because as a railroad baron, you’re interested in more than owning the railways—you also want to own a piece of the action along the rails, too.
As you run track and locomotives, you’ll make money by connecting disparate towns and cities to each other, or places where raw materials are harvested and mined to places where they’re refined into finished goods. You can also invest your money in the businesses that grow up alongside these tracks. Buy the power plant that needs oil from the nearby refinery to operate, for example, and make money both transporting raw materials and using them. You can do this over and over again to amplify your wealth.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
http://www.macworld.com/article/2015063/review-sid-meiers-railroads-is-a-fun-and-challenging-look-at-a-fascinating-industry.html
