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NOT A FUN GAME!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 8
Date: May 09, 2000
Author: Amazon User

After spending a few hours trying to decipher the mysteries of Railroad Tycoon II, I finally experienced enlightenment and realized I was NOT having fun. The game has many tempting possibilities of entertainment, but I found the game frustrating to play. The manual does not explain much; building stations and laying track are difficult and unforgiving tasks. I have not played the first version of the game, and this may explain my befuddlement.

In short, I would not recommend this game. In fact if you really want this game, my trash pick up is on Thursday and this game will be in the can.

Saying the truth!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 11
Date: April 02, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I have never heard about this game, but one day, I saw it on a shelf, in a computer store. Iv'e read about it and it sounded really fun. It sounded really fun to build a train company, and to build train stations but when i really tried it, it was so hard, and it wasn't fun. It's hard to understand the investments thing and you are loosing all of your money in 5 minutes. I dont understand why is everybody saying that this game is good, cause this game is bad. VERY BAD! VERY, VERY BAD! Who can prove that i'm wrong? a couple of days after i bought i started to use cheats in the game because it is too hard. This game should get 0 starts, it should get nothing. So... Dont buy it because you'll just be waisting your money!!

I really, really wanted to like this game...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: June 01, 2000
Author: Amazon User

... but ultimately decided I never would.

The original Railroad Tycoon game ranked as one of my all-time favourite computer games. I wasted countless hours laying track well into the night and cursing computer players when they started buying my stock. When I discovered RTII for the Mac, I purchased it immediately...

And found a game that proves that bells and whistles aren't always good things.

RTII has a very pretty, forced perspective map of the area in which tracks are being layed, but the nature of the map makes it neigh-impossible to predict exactly where the tracks are going to end up unless one practices extensively. In other words, one has to *work* just to figure out how to play the game. And, as far as computer games go, that's not my idea of fun.

Despite not being able to play the game, I'm giving it Two Stars. It's pretty, the sound effects are nice, and the idea of laying tracks in Africa and Asia appeals greatly to me. In concept, the game *is* superior to the original RT and takes advantage of the advances we've seen in technology in recent years... but the designers (or developers, I'm not sure who to blame) just didn't know when to quit.

I think I could have enjoyed this game immensely if it had had been presented with an old-fashioned top-down/2D view of the play surface rather than enduldge themselves in making the game prettier. Maybe that could have been an option that could have been provided--I don't know enough about computer programming to know if such a thing would have been possible. As things stand, 'Railroad Tycoon II' is just taking up space in my game CD rack.

Brother, can you spare a dime?

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 5
Date: January 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I never could get this game chugging on more than one cylinder. The manual is irrevelant and no outside game helps are published (I've looked for more than a year). Play the stockmarket ??? Forget about it ... If you are not into the esoterica of steam trains or stupid country music, the computer steals the fun and always has you dead to rights. Historical trade and industrial patterns are treated very lightly indeed. I like to able to play the game, but I couldn't make it do anything.

Dont get it

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 3
Date: December 09, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This game is worth about 28 hours of good play than it realy gets boring. It isnt proportional eather if you play a scenario game and make a 6 car train, it would stretch from Millwalkie to Chicago. The graphics are very good and so is the sound but, thats the best part of the game. I give this game 2 stars.

Railroad Tycoon II

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: September 01, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Railroad Tycoon II is a real time strategy game by Poptop software with complex interactions, interesting graphics and lots of thinking. The gameplay reminds me of Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon, In which you play a tycoon who control the trains, buses, planes and ships in the tycoon world. In RRT2 you play as the railroad baron and control the train transportation, Buy and sell stocks, set the train routes, lay the railway tracks, stations and take over companies. There are lots of real life trains and cities. The gameplay is quite good, It takes a while to learn to play and be good at it. RRT2's graphics are very good, The towns are very beautifully desinged, There are lots of beautiful terrain and real looking buildings, The world looks real, with rivers, forests, snow and hilly mountains. RRT2's screnario's are also very well desinged and a lot fun to play, It also comes with a screnario editor for you to create your own screnario's. Railroad Tycoon II has got a clumsy interface, It is very hard to lay the tracks with the mouse. There are other annoying factors like, You don't get enough money, It's hard to manage things when you have a lot of trains and stations, You need to pay a lot of attention at the stock market to make money ect. Railroad Tycoon II is a very good game but quite hard to play. If you like this game get Transport Tycoon, It is more intresting, lot more fun and quite easy compared to this.

Railroad Tycoon II

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: August 30, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Very involving strategy game, has a good tutorial to supplement it. But very hard and quite frustrating.

Highly addictive at first

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 3
Date: July 05, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game is fun the first time you play it, except laying railroads and building the same towns over and over again gets boring. I immediately started searching for cheats, which give the game a little more boost, but it was collecting dust in about a month. Dont waist your money. If you think you would like this game buy Roller Coaster Tycoon instead.

Like It So Far

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: July 30, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I just got the game a few days ago included in a value pack. I am currently playing the campaigns and so far I am enjoying the game. Even my husband is playing it.
Pros: Sim type game
Different type of trains and several campaigns which I love
Is challenging for an average game player don't know about hardcore players
Con's: The game tutorial was okay, but wish I could find a way to start back at the beginning of it. When my husband wanted to play I had to tell him how to do it instead of him doing the tutorial because it wouldn't start back at the beginning
Other than that I don't know of any other cons since I have just started playing and haven't started the scenerios.
You do get tired of laying down tracks all the time, and have to zoom in and out.
So far I am really enjoying it

Promising...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: June 12, 2003
Author: Amazon User

"Railroad Tycoon II" is the 1998 sequel to the 1990 classic "Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon". Even though Sid's name has jumped ship, this is a solid sequel to a great game. The premise is simple enough: Build a railroad, buy some trains, ship stuff from where it is to where it's needed. Get rich.

From humble concepts mighty games are grown, and enriching this basic idea are things like: train quality, which forces you to choose between [cost], fast, good on slopes, or reliable; keeping demand high by supplying only small amounts versus the cost of connecting other places where demand is high; short routes with small payloads and fast turnarounds versus long routes with big payloads; buying and selling stocks to take advantage of economic trends; buying the businesses whose materials you're transporting; defending against train robbers or hiring shady characters and exploiting legal loopholes; and so on.

Basically, this premise works, and supplies hours of good, addictive fun. There's a lot of replay value as well, since you can take a different approach to each game. The graphics are (still, even in 2003) pleasant and communicative, and the sound is mostly good. The scenarios are pretty challenging without (for the most part) being crushingly hard, and the three levels of victories encourages replay as you try to "go for the gold".

The are a number of hitches, unfortunately. The manual and tutorial are really inadequate--which tends to sting given that most of the fan-supplied data on the Web is gone. The supply-and-demand process is actually somewhat opaque. (I did figure it out, but it took me a while and some research on the 'net.) Your board of directors is very gullible, not able to look ahead even a month (this makes them easy to manipulate). The stock market stuff makes it easy to lose with a thriving railroad and doesn't add much to the game that I've experienced.

Further, trains really only go from point A to point B. That is, say you have cattle yard (B) that needs grain and two grain farms (A1 and A2) that supply grain, you can't set up a train to pick up grain at A1, travel to A2 to pick up more grain, and then travel to B to drop it off. When the train stops, it's completely unloaded. This is never spelled out anywhere, and certain ways of setting up a train's route suggest otherwise. But in the above situation, your train will actually unload grain at a grain farm (for no money) rather than haul it another ten miles to the cattle yard, where it's actually needed.

The scale of the game is such that each train moves about 1/50th-1/100th of its actual speed. In other words, a trip that should take a week takes a year. This is probably a necessary abstraction(train-model fans will want to keep in mind that this game has NOTHING to do with their hobby) but it has the effect of exaggerating every mistake or mishap. Jesse James didn't just rob a single train, he robbed your entire route for the year.

All of this detracts a bit, but it's a testament to the strength of the concept and execution that this would still be a five-star game, even with these issues. The killer--the thing that made me subtract a star--is the track-laying interface. It's really easy to lay track you didn't mean to. There's no undo. It actually costs you to remove it. The way the UI figures out the smoothest route is dubious, and there's really no decent handling for the fact that finding the smoothest track is best done at the closest zoom while finding the shortest route is best done at the furthest zoom.

Coupled with some bugs that make stations seem disconnected, you can end up in a situation where you lose a game because the track-laying interface was not up to the task. And that's the only =real= sour lemon in this package. Again, though, even with this, there's still a lot of fun.

It'll definitely whet your apetite for "Railroad Tycoon 3".

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