f you've ever been stuck on a late-running train and thought to yourself, "I could run the railways better than this," here's your chance to prove it.
Harking back to old strategy classics like Transport and Railroad Tycoon, this new mobile version offers you the opportunity to be a railway magnate, transporting passengers, mail and materials.
Train Tycoon delivers all you'd expect from a railway-based strategy game. You build tracks and bridges (reshaping the land's contours to suit your purposes), not forgetting stations, then buy trains to run on them. Once you've got the above base elements, you just have to refit your trains and expand your network to get the dollars rolling in.
There's a Free Game open-ended mode, as well as a 13-mission campaign, which starts off with tutorials and then gets more complicated as rival tycoons compete against you (you didn't think you'd have it all your own way, did you?).
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In a nutshell, that's the game. Nothing revolutionary but if you love trains and the above description gets you excited, then Train Tycoon should obviously appeal.
Let us pull the emergency brake before you rush off to download it, though, because there are some serious issues. For a start, the controls are unnecessarily awkward and aren't at all intuitive. It's surprising to find just how incredibly annoying monotonous scrolling through the menus with no shortcuts becomes after a while.
In addition, the grid-based maps are isometric, and while you can press the '1', '3', '7' and '9' buttons to move the cursor one square at a time, try to move it too quickly and suddenly the game loses track and you find yourself jumping to squares on the vertical/horizontal axes.
One seemingly helpful feature is the game's ability to automatically build track between two points for you, but in practice it often chooses unnecessarily expensive routes. If money's tight you'll therefore find yourself laboriously building long lengths of track inch by inch.
Also, the size of the screen is too small. You can zoom out to see the whole map (with coloured dots symbolising places of interest), but the only other camera angle is incredibly tight to the ground, sometimes making it hard to remain aware of what's going on.
Another gripe is that it takes so damn long to do anything. Until you've got an extensive railway system up and running with passengers and material flowing freely, you'll struggle to earn enough cash to quickly build your network. When it can take five minutes (even with time compression) to earn enough money to build the next stage of your railway between two towns, you soon start losing interest.
There's more. During missions, when up against rivals, you don't get a sense of how they're doing. You can see their railways on the zoomed-out map but there's no indication as to what they're doing or how they're comparing with your efforts.
All of which is a shame, because buried under Train Tycoon's counter-intuitive controls is an interesting and comprehensive game. Randomly generated maps will always offer new challenges and it is satisfying to create a smooth-running network, but when it's so fiddly to control and takes too long to do anything of note, most people are likely to lose interest and jump off the ride before finding any of this out. |
