Railroad Pioneer review

Set in the late 19th Century, Railroad Pioneer casts you as a small time railway owner who embarks on the challenge of building America’s first transcontinental railway. This real-time railway strategy simulator is trying to elbow into the market cornered by the classic Railroad Tycoon series. To try and win gamers away from the established series JoWood and Kritzelkratz 3000 have tried to blend the typical railroad simulator with elements from the real-time strategy genre to create an innovative entry in the genre.

New Railway Technology

Railroad Pioneer tries to blend elements of gaming that are traditionally associated with the real-time strategy with the railroad simulator. This is immediately noticeable when you start with a landscape that is mostly blacked out. The “fog of war” effect means that in the early stages of the game you can only see the land immediately around your station. This has the bonus of meaning that there is more to the game than just laying track between two cities. The downside is that you can’t see other cities or structures that you can link to, meaning that you must send out expensive search parties and find other areas to link to before you can start to run trains.

Searching Every Which Way

Search parties are the main element of the real-time strategy parts of the game. You construct a party from a variety of different personnel. The range of people available includes pioneers who help reveal terrain, prospectors, balloonists to help travel over mountains and specialists such as trappers and gunslingers who help when the party runs into trouble from wild animals or bandits. Various dangers appear on the map which indicate the type of person you need in your party and, because you can’t see these dangers until your party uncovers the terrain, it adds an element of careful planning into the composition of your search parties. Ultimately though, whilst innovative and different, this element of the game only really serves to slow down progress.

Interface Class

The problems with Railroad Pioneer start almost straight away with the interface. There is a brief tutorial in the first two missions of the single player campaign. This deals with the basics of the game such as laying track and sending out search parties. The deeper aspects of the game such as the politics, competition and maintenance aren’t touched on and you have to figure them out for yourself. Because the interface is never properly explained it immediately seems ungainly. As you progress at the game the interface starts to work itself out, although it isn’t the most intuitive or easy to use.

Can you hear me?

Notable by its absence is the soundtrack to Railroad Pioneer. There are a few sound effects of trains as they go past the screen but that’s about it. This does have an advantage that you can put on a CD and not worry about missing the sound effects and music track. The absence of even a basic soundtrack is rather poor and seems like adding a score was an idea that just got forgotten or that the developers ran out of time for. The graphics of any strategy game aren’t going to be astonishing, they’re 3D isometric and small. That said the graphics in Railroad Pinooer have more detail than might be expected at the size and the landscapes have obviously had some time spent on them. It would be tempting to make a game set in the deserts and bare landscapes of early America rather bland and pass it off as historical. The developers, to their credit, have put plenty of variety into the textures and scenery that your railway will be running through.

You’re on your own

Railroad Pioneer is primarily a single player experience. This is handled through the campaign of missions with goals such as joining particular sites by rail and delivering certain goods to towns. Each mission has a time limit which must be met or you are forced to restart it. There is variety in the missions but the most frustrating thing is that each mission starts afresh, that is none of your money from previous missions can be transferred. This means that making a profit on your railroad is only a secondary concern as only the trains and carriages themselves are transferable. During the campaign missions you will face competition from rival railway owners. This allows you to trade to try to win control of stations. This feature allows for multiplayer action across the Internet. Up to four players are allowed at a time on the web games, although these are thin on the ground so this should really be considered a single player only game.

A missed opportunity

Railroad Pioneer is a brave attempt to take a one product market and try to open it up to competition. The dominance of the train market by Railroad Tycoon has left little option for competitors in the railway strategy genre. Microsoft recently had a go at the train driving simulator but no one has really tried to best Railroad Tycoon at its own game. This has meant that there is room for innovation and learning from other genres. Railroad Pioneer tries to live up to its name by drawing on elements from the real-time strategy genre to which the railway strategy game has closest links. The aspects it draws on do add a new element to the genre although they do slow down the action, making you work even harder to build your railway. The presentation makes the game feel half complete and the learning curve on the interface is unnecessary and sloppy on the tutorial. In all, Railroad Pioneer has some good, well implemented ideas but it also has some half hearted, half thought out ones. This is definitely one for the Railroad Tycoon fans who want something a bit different to keep them going.