Review: Railroad Tycoon 3

I've spent enough time in my life in Tycoon games that I should realistically be sitting back and enjoying my first million by now. I understand the tactics of capitalizing on the stock market; I know how to build cities and amusement parks; I could drive a truck cross country, meet up with a train, and make a profit on the logging industry, all at the same time.

But, alas, I'm still sitting here, writing this review of yet another Tycoon game.

The upside is that I consider Railroad Tycoon 3 to be the crowning achievement of the series, and potentially a contender for the crown of the tycoon genre (although it'll be hard to unseat Roller Coaster).

What's New with 3?

Well, for one thing, you'll be hard-pressed to play this game on your old laptop. Unfortunately, this is how I wiled the time away on my own one hour train ride to and from work, back in the day when Railroad Tycoon 2 was still new. The reason you can't do this with the most recent version is the fantastic graphical enhancements that seem better suited to the polygon pushers that are the latest crop of graphics cards.

With simple and industry consistent mouse movements, you can zoom your camera in until the train on which you're focusing fills the screen, you can rotate the view around until you get the exact angle up the mountain where you'd like to lay your next track, and you can zoom it all out seamlessly to get a world view of your resources and connected cities.

In all of this, they've added "whiz-bang" features that I still find myself using for no particular reason beyond the enjoyment factor: You can attach a camera to a train, and follow it through its navigation down the lines. This harkens back to my time as a little boy, when my father constructed a massive train set for me, and I was in charge of gluing the trees to the ground surrounding the tracks. I never tired of putting my head at eye level with the oncoming locomotive, and imaging that I was watching a real train coming right at the curve in front of my head.

Now, to complete the fascination, all the people at PopTop have to add to this is an option to build roadways, so I can connect up my electric racetrack like I did when I was a kid. It would be really something to stage the kind of "massive loss of life" crashes that I did when I was a kid.

It's the New Economy, Stupid

The enhancements for RT3 go beyond just a pretty makeover. In this latest installment, the railroads are no longer operating in a vacuum of shipment options for cargo. At least in the prior installments, it was almost as if no one ever got anything to any place else without the benefit of rail transport.

In this version, at least, some credence has been given to the fact that rail travel and transport benefited from other means of travel and transport as much as it competed with it. You could never really manage to drop rail stations at every point where a cargo is being produced in the older titles. Now, in this game, there's a gradual automated process whereby neighboring producers (like farmers, for example) bring their wares to the nearest station overland (or, quicker by river) and the station slowly builds up a stock in those elementary substances.

You can capitalize on this new method of supply by purchasing and building the rights to the demand. Many people have casually remarked that Railroad Tycoon 3 should have been renamed "Industry Tycoon", due to the fact that one can easily make a profit buying up the right industries at the right time. You can actually create a false demand for a product in a city by building up phase 2 or phase 3 industrial buildings in that city, and eventually creating a megalopolis where previously there existed a one horse town.

Multiplayer

Like in most titles, playing against the AI can get tiresome. This is particularly noteworthy in RT3, where the AI can get easily confused by geographical barriers to expansion, and is never really an opponent to your success (even in the hardest difficulties). Enter the new feature for RT3: Multiplayer.

Starting and/or connecting to multiplayer games is as easy as you might expect it to be. Finding a game where you're not completely outmatched by the freaks that play this thing 24/7 is much harder. I have, on more than one occasion, taken a map where I was particularly comfortable, and had my investors cry bloody murder at me by year 5, simply because my opponent was running rings around me.

I'm convinced that running the game without pausing it for an hour or two between moves requires an almost supernatural understanding of the costs, profit potentials, and the inner workings of the human mind. Either that, or the bastards figured out a way to cheat.

Old Favorites

Like the previous entries in the Railroad Tycoon series, this latest entry still contains the dynamic of starting a company, laying some track, connecting some trains, and shipping some cargo. It's familiar enough that you can play through a couple of scenarios successfully without feeling the need to dive into the massive complexity of the game.

Many people have faulted this entry for the almost "auto-pilot" nature on which it can run. But, I believe quite the opposite. I always felt that Tycoon 2 was so complex, and that this complexity was an overall requirement for successful play, that this ongoing maintenance commonly obscured any fun I was having playing the game at all.

Other things that you'll notice about this game that you've come to expect from the series: An attention to historical detail, a massive number of trains from which to choose, a map editor to create your own scenarios and campaigns, sound effects and music reflective of the time in which you are playing, and cinematic moments that are nearly emblematic of the series.

Quibbles

RT3, like its predecessors, is a game not for the faint of heart. It's simply too complex and requires enough fascination with economics that the average game player may not find it engaging. Certainly, there's nothing here that's attractive to a wider audience.

I would have liked to have seen a scenario or campaign that specifically addressed the entire capacity of Railroad Tycoon 3. Sure, you can continue any scenario or campaign after the goals have been met and you've been given your reward, but after that you're working without any clear goals. I'd love to see a scenario where the gold medal is awarded to the first one to get the best train in the game (whatever that might be for the scenario), beginning in 1805 and running 200 years. Of course, using the editor, one could probably come up with a scenario just like this, but it seems more satisfactory coming from the game company itself.

Speaking of scenarios, many of the included scenarios are playable at any level of difficulty. Your skill is an obvious factor in how well you do. However, in some of the scenarios, I find the difficulty either hasn't been tested thoroughly enough, or the testers have lost sight of the capabilities of the average player. Some general audience beta testing could have done a wonder of good, here.

Like its predecessors, the major feedback events for RT3 come in the form of popup windows that, by default, pause the game until closed. If you turn off these notifications, you're simply not notified about them. You don't have the option of seeing a compressed version in the scroll of information that included stock and purchasing events for all of the players in the game. If it does have this, I certainly never caught any of the notifications. It can be troublesome to have to deal with an unexplained depression of fund values when you could have known to weather out the storm because the market has entered a recession, and it's not directly your fault.

Conclusions

Railroad Tycoon 3, like Civilization, is one of those games I intend to keep on my desktop for many years to come. It not only provides engaging long-term game play, but it returns to me a fascination with trains that I haven't felt since before hair started growing in certain places on my body.

My overall rating for this game is 90%.