Railroad Corporation 2 is a new game which has just been released in early access. It is developed by Corbie Games and published by Iceberg Interactive.
The game is a mix of railroad building and industry logistics game play. That said, the railroad you construct is very much the backbone of the whole operation – without a railroad, no industrial development since the basis is to move commodities like grain, coal, mail and passengers from point A to point B in order to make a profit from it.
This is of course done by constructing a railroad. In campaign mode you start off with a company headquarter and a CEO of the company. Depending on who you select as CEO, they come with bonuses and drawbacks in form of slightly cheaper railroad construction, slightly higher commodity purchase costs, and the like.
The railroad track laying starts out from a station and functions very well. It is quite easy to drag out a length of track which also indicates the potential max speed for the track in question. It is possibly to construct bridges – in three variants – as well as tunnels and cuts, and if you want or need a double track it is easy to make a second track go parallel with the first by holding alt while laying it out. When you have managed to plan a good route for the track, you accept it and the money for it is deducted. It is in other words easy to plan and experiment with the track laying before you have to commit to it.
As for running a train, the locomotive has to be purchased but the carriages show up automatically when needed. But you have full control over how much should be loaded and unloaded at the separate stations. This can be a bit tricky to wrap your head around at first since not everything is explained clearly. A bit of experimentation and discovery about the loading and unloading choices was involved here.
The very first noticeable difference is that unlike all other railroad transportation games I’ve played, in this you actually have to purchase the commodity you want to transport. Which may be a little weird since I thought most freight in the real world works on a contractual basis of someone paying you to transport something for them. But I suppose there may be a game play reason for this difference.
From that point on it follows the more standard route of transporting the demanded commodity to the right places in order to make the world go forward. The already existing factories in the towns need different commodities in order to produce their own goods, the town themselves will grow if they get good passenger service, and so on.
But why stop at running a railroad? As a modern industrialist you can also start setting up and investing in a number of industries such as brick works, warehouses, lumber mills, and the likes. Thus creating the demand for products which will have to be transported by rail.
To your help you have the four departments of your company – research, finance, geology, and lobbying. The research department uses scientists to unlock new locomotives and technology while the finance department can be staffed with people who provide financial bonuses for specific commodities. The geology department is what you need when trying to discover new raw materials on the map.
The lobbying department, finally, is the one to turn to for the interaction with the different towns and cities you serve. Through it you can influence the towns in different directions that will help your business directly or indirectly. Among other things, towns can provide industrial and social plots of land on which you can construct buildings such as factories, warehouses, or even churches (which provide a growth bonus for the town).
The construction of factories under your direct ownership is beneficial in order to make better use of commodities available in the vicinity, while the building of warehouses increases the logistics possibilities since they make you able to ship a commodity from a source to a destination without having to use the same train for the whole journey. One train can take it to the warehouse, where the goods will be in temporary storage until picked up by another train for further transport.
This is also very useful since in this game everything has a load limit. A train can only pull so much weight and a town and its different factories only need a certain amount of things. It is also important to remember that factories also need to get rid of their produced goods – there seem to be no local sale of them, but everything has to be transported away to some other destination by train.
As with most early access game, a purchase of the game is to be seen as partially an investment for the future since the game ”as is” isn’t the end product. In the case of Railroad Corporation 2 their current development roadmap shows the plan for the coming year, up to the end of 2025. And – it must be said – it shows that the game is still in an early stage of its development.
From a game stability point of view, the game is already quite decent and fully playable, even if for now the sandbox game option is probably the most entertaining one. What lacks is more choices and a bit of polish.
As it is, the world as seen is currently in an always winter state, even though the year ticks away. This feels like a bit of an odd design choice to start with, in particular in a game where you transport among other things grain. A green biome is in the future plan even if it is slightly unclear by the roadmap if it will be a separate game biome choice at start or – hopefully – a summer/winter cycle.
For now there is also no AI competitors in the game so the only real challenge right now is provided by the four campaign chapters. There is however already a multiplayer option for those who want a bit of human competition or cooperation.
The obvious gold standard which an old enough gamer like I tend to hold any railroad game to is of course Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon series. So how does Railroad Corporation 2 hold up in that comparison?
The answer will be: fairly promising. In parts it does hint of being able to one day do quite a bit of what made those games so attractive and addictive. The running a railroad company feeling is there and so is the resources and commodities moving and developing. The laying of track is smooth enough even if some aspects of it such as the height positioning could be even more detailed.
What mostly lacks is the scale. The map is so much smaller and a fantasy product, unlike Railroad Tycoon’s possibility to lay tracks over most of the US or Europe. This reluctance to use real world geography is something Railroad Corporation 2 share with most modern contenders though, and who knows, maybe future development may make it possible for more realistic geography in one way or another.
The fact is that given it is still an early access and quite early into it as well, Railroad Corporation 2 feels promising. I don’t think we really should expect it to ever become the modern successor to the famous genre-setter of old, but it does have a good possibility to become a quite nice and relaxing railroad building game to play.
