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Good but Disappointing

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 136 / 144
Date: November 06, 2003
Author: Amazon User

RT2 is one of my favorite games--it's one of only a handful of computer games that has been on my computer continuously since I first loaded it. A game I have always been able to get pleasure from. The wonderful music, the fabulous gameplay, the fun & detailed graphics--Railroad Tycoon 2 is everything a great computer game should be. When I found out that there would be yet another edition of Railroad Tycoon I was delighted. 3D graphics? Great! New gameplay options? Bring 'em on! And over & above my anticipation of a new Railroad Tycoon was a steadfast faith in the game's creators that the game would be everything it should be.

My first impression was very favorable. The first scenario in the campaign, in which you have to build track from Boston to Buffalo, begins with the camera showing the Atlantic Ocean washing ashore on the east coast of Massachusetts. The sound of the waves hitting the beach, the gentle wash of the ocean, the colorful leaves on the trees combined to create one of those gaming moments that you remember for a long time. In short, the sound & graphics are great & it's a joy to play a game in such an ambience. And, of course, the music is back just as enjoyable as it has always been.

New features include other modes of transportation (such as trucks, boats, & planes) competing with your rail line to deliver cargo. In RT2, nothing moved unless you or one of the AI companies moved it. In RT3, sometimes those cattle will get to the packing plant on their own. This feature has promise but it's hard to tell what effect it's having on the game since it's hard to see the immediate effects of this movement. You can also set AI to manage your consists for you--i.e. decide what types of cargo your trains will carry. You can, of course, still do that on your own--more on that below. You can also build tunnels & large suspension bridges although those things are hugely expensive.

As you may have suspected there's a "but" coming in this review. That "but" is the gameplay, which I feel is inferior to the gameplay in RT2. My biggest enjoyment in RT2 comes from searching out profitable routes to build--finding places where cattle can be brought to a packing plant or grain brought to a bakery or even longer cargo chains (i.e. chemicals to a fertilizer plant, fertilizer to a grain field, grain to a cattle ranch, cattle to a packing plant, food to a city). Creating & managing these routes is, in my opinion, the most enjoyable part of the game. This is one reason why RT2 was so superior to Tropico, a game from the same company that uses the same engine. When you run out of cash in RT2, you can spend all your time managing cargo & connections while in Tropico when you run out of money you can do nothing but sit & look. In RT3, despite the wonderful graphics, the structures are almost impossible to pick out of the surrounding terrain. The icons are small & many of them are very similar. Likwise, the icons representing the freight cars are often completely indistinguishable from each other. Is that brown freight car filled with clothing or toys? You can't tell unless you mouseover it which is darned annoying & makes managing your trains needlessly difficult. In RT2 I would build stuff till I was out of money & then sit & play with the trains until I could spend more cash. In RT3, I find myself turning on the auto-consist manager & spending my time planning where to build track. This is more fun than many computer games, but it's a *lot* less fun than the previous edition of the game.

Another issue is the stability of the game. RT2 was a rock, but RT3 has already crashed to the desktop three times in the short time I've been playing it. Extremely annoying when you've spent a half an hour building an intricate set of track only to lose it to a crash. The game also sometimes gets stuttery after I create a save game.

My verdict? I'll give it a few more days & try to tease some fun out of the game. And if I change my mind I'll certainly post a changed opinion. But right now, the likelihood is that I'll be back playing RT2 very soon.

The best tycoon series around

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 106 / 115
Date: November 01, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Back in 1998, Railroad Tycoon 2 basically kicked off the tycoon-game frenzy. Now RRT3 is here and it has gone fully 3D. PopTop software is using a very powerful 3D engine with an easy-to-use camera system, and the results are beautiful. Hills and valleys look realistic, lakes and oceans look gorgeous, and the game has a new night-and-day cycle as well as weather effects. Even on lower end systems, the game effortlessly zooms from a satellite view to a close-up look at the buildings in a town.

Players of Railroad Tycoon 2 will notice that managing cargo and routes is easier than ever before. The game features a campaign as well as standalone missions and maps. And the map editor is extremely powerful and easier-to-use than ever before. PopTop also listened to fans of RRT2 and has added the most requested features: bridges and tunnels. Your trains can also carry more cars than before.

The heart of the game, of course, is building your rail network and managing your empire. Laying track requires that you pay careful attention to the terrain to avoid steep hills, as you make profits based on how fast you deliver passengers and cargo. You have dozens of engines to choose from, all rendered in exceptional detail. The economic model has been strengthened and is now much more realistic -- passengers only want to go to certain cities now, and cities need to be supplied with goods to grow and prosper.

Of course, computer opponents will compete with you for lucrative routes, and other modes of transportation like rivers will also serve cities independently of the railroads, so careful planning will be rewarded. Fortunately the game gives you lots of overlays and data views to help you manage your empire, so you can spend more time watching your trains haul logs through dense forests or speed passengers along the plains to distant cities. PopTop has always been incredibly good at taking complicated games and making them accessible for everyone, even novice players, and Railroad Tycoon 3 appears to be no exception. This is a fantastic game that is only going to get better as the series' countless fans begin creating and uploading user maps, thereby making the replay value almost infinite. If you like strategy games, you really shouldn't miss this one.

Best of the series and that's very good, indeed.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 51 / 52
Date: December 12, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Real rating would be 4 1/2 stars.

As a piece of software, RT3 is not perfect, but it is better than 90% of what's out there. It's rock-solid stable on my computer but there are those who have experienced a lot of problems, almost all related to issues with graphics cards. There are few bugs with the code and none that detract from my enjoyment of the game. PopTop's support for their products has been top notch in the past and RT3 is proving that again. New maps and code updates have already been provided and more are coming.

Now, as a game... is it fun? You bet! If you liked either of its predecessor's then I really think you'll enjoy this one. The 3D engine incorporated is the first thing you'll notice right away. Then as you start to play you're going to really start to see how different this game/simulation is from RT1 & 2. In fact, that has to be said as a warning: RT3 is NOT just RT2 with 3D graphics. If that's what you want, this isn't it. For me, that's not the bad news, it's a major part of the good news. RT3 now has a whole new economic model underneath it that literally makes the entire game new. The world's farms and factories won't sit idle waiting for your railroad to haul the goods for them. If you don't move them, the 'invisible' transportation network (overland and by water) will move them instead--oh, and don't bother trying to compete with the canal and river transport in most eras.

As others have said the micromanagement aspects of the game have been greatly reduced. Some may not like that but I do--I feel much more in the role of the tycoon controlling a financial empire with a railroad as its centerpiece. You can manage every train and every carload but you're better off letting the game do that and concentrating on the strategic business of figuring out which industrial segments to go after and which cities will benefit you most if you lay track to them. On the other hand, I often find myself simply taking the 3D camera right down to the locomotive and going along for the (often spectacular) ride.

Yes, there are things I would have done differently. And there are things I don't like (the way maint. facilities are handled was better in RT2) but on balance RT3 is an excellent product and worthy follow-up to RT1&2.

Pro:
-- Still the addictive builder-sim gameplay as always.
-- 3D engine is very good; great "ride along" views.
-- Economic model is much more realistic, particularly for the golden era timeframe (late 1800's thru about 1920).
-- Most of the micromanagement is gone.
-- Excellent editor lets you modify current maps and make new ones.
-- Excellent support by the vendor and an active fan base.

Con:
-- The computer players (AI) are poor to awful. Don't expect them to be any real competition. However, improvements are promised in an update.
-- Too few maps come with it. (Fans and vendor updates are fixing this, tho')
-- Track laying and map scale issues result in unrealistic track grades that detract from the appearance (but have little effect on gameplay).

Bottom line:
If you like the builder simulation kind of game, this one is likely to appeal to you. If you like trains or railroad history then I'm confident you'll find RT3 worth the purchase price and then some. PopTop has another winner here and with a few changes it may be a superstar in the genre.

The developers confused "family friendly" with "childlike"

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 38 / 42
Date: September 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I was addicted to Railroad Tycoon 2, but unfortunately it wouldn't play under my new operating system. I was thrilled to find RT3 and eagerly awaited its delivery.

Unfortunately, RT3 has lost much of the complexity and the underhandedness that made RT2 so much fun. For example:

- in RT2, only industries or resources inside your station's field of influence would be serviced by your trains. In RT3, each station has a vague, undefined "area of influence" that goes beyond the size of your station's shown field. Is that feedlot, grain farm, or mine close enough to your station so you don't have to build another closer station? Good luck figuring it out.

- in RT2, one could designate different loads for cars in the same manifest. This can't be done now. This makes it very difficult to produce goods manufactured from more than one type of raw material.

- the graphics are very comic-book like, and would more appeal to children around the age of three than they would adults. Very unattractive and simplistic. I would have even preferred a 2-D model with more sophistication.

- the business models have been vastly oversimplified, and the AI companies are not one thousandth as cutthroat as in RT2. This is a bad thing. Historically, rail companies were not paragons of industry; for a historical sim to be realistic, it has to reflect the true conditions of the industry. The rail business in RT3 appears to have been emasculated, perhaps to appeal to young naive children, but it's lost much of its interest for adults.

- creating new maps and new scenarios is much more complicated in RT3 than it was in RT2.

- the weather is a useless, worthless feature that eats memory. Yes, you can turn it off, but it still takes up a lot of space in storage memory.

I did not much enjoy RT3. It appears to have lost much of the detail that made RT2 so enjoyable (wasn't it great to finally get iron *and* coal, send one train of each to the place with the steel plant, get back two trains of steel, send them to some place with a manufacturing plant, and then send the goods to your largest city? You could do similar feats with produce and steel, with rubber, steel, and oil, etc. hoping all the time that your competitor didn't build a station in the same city and scoop your goods. Great fun. With RT3, you don't get that ability to follow your cargo from raw material to finished goods.

Railroad Tycoon II was a hard act to follow

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 27 / 28
Date: December 17, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Most reviewers agree on one thing: Railroad Tycoon II is a great game, a true classic, that has provided endless hours of enjoyment.

A game that great creates some pretty high standards, and results in high expectations when its sequel is released. That is exactly what has happened here. Every difference between RT2 & RT3 seems to be a source of disappointment for somebody, and now we see some pretty harsh reviews of RT3 by people who wish that the developers had left RT2 totally intact.

This seems a bit unfair to me. If there had never been a predecessor to Railroad Tycoon 3, how would we judge the game based strictly on its own merits? I suspect we would consider RT3 to be one of the better games out there.

What is there to like about the game, judged on its own merits? I personally find the new 3D graphics to be very impressive, and the player interface is very easy to use. The camera feature, where the player can follow a particular train along its root, is a load of fun. For those of us who love trains, this is a great feature.

I have mixed feelings on the new economic model. On the one hand, the RT2 economic model was simple and easy to follow, but not exactly realistic. RT3 takes into account that there were other means of transportation besides the railroads. It also recognizes that passengers will not necessarily go wherever you insist on transporting them. The more complex economic model means that you exert less control on the economy than in RT2. Is this better or worse? That is a real toss-up.

Another toss-up would be the auto consists now featured in RT3. Some people miss the micromanagement, and some people who were driven crazy by the constant need in RT2 to micromanage are glad to see introduction of the auto consist. Personally, there were times when I really preferred not to micromanage every detail, but there were times that I enjoyed the control. One can choose to override the auto consist in RT3. I think the fact that one has a choice now is a definite improvement.

Another common complaint among reviewers is that the scenarios now have requirements to win a gold, silver or bronze medal. You don't just start playing, but instead the game shoehorns you into pursuing specific goals. I found this a little disconcerting, because I always thought that was what the campaign was for. However, if you don't like being forced to play a scenario a certain way, just ignore the scenario's goals and do what you want! Of course you will bomb out after the designated time period, but who cares? You can then continue to play the scenario as you please.

I do have a problem with the lack of maps and a smaller selection of locomotives. Like another reviewer complained, there is no North America map! That was one of the biggest disappointments for me. However, the developers have been creating new maps that can be downloaded (so far, the US Pacific Coast and Spain), and one hopes that they will continue to offer more maps that will further improve the game.

One hopes also that the developers will also offer improvements that will make the AI a little more competitive, because right now the AI leaves a lot to be desired. I would also hope that the stock market is improved.

Overall, I find that I enjoy playing RT3 for the most part, and that should be the question people ask, rather than "is it as good as RT2?" If I want to play RT2, I still have it downloaded onto the computer. I have that choice. It doesn't detract from the enjoyment that its successor brings, and that is enough to satisfy me.

Fun - Still the best

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 26 / 27
Date: November 14, 2003
Author: Amazon User

First off, I haven't had a problem with crashing. One crash to desktop in twenty hours of play. The game runs very smoothly, even with 25 trains. The graphics look good. Just for your information, I'm running the game on XP pro, Geforce 4 ti 4600 and 512 DDR RAM.

I've tried Trainz and a new train game called Railroad Pioneer and Railroad Tycoon 3 is in my opinion far superior, mostly because of the financial aspect. The towns are already there. You link them up and select engines and which businesses you want to buy. Making money is fun. In RRT2 you'd get a "kaching" sound for every coin you made. I kind of miss that as they took it out in RRT3, but then your house sounded like a Vegas slots room when you had a lot of trains using the old sound effect.

Some people don't like the new auto consist device, but I don't have a problem with it. Once you get more than five trains, it can be a real chore to manage all your cars. The new method allows you to concentrate on expanding, getting loans, connecting more cities and so forth.

The trains are a lot less sluggish. It's fun to lock the camera and go for a ride. Best way to show off the impressive scenery, day, night effects, weather.

The new bridges and tunnels are nice, but I've yet to master them. Track laying is never as precise as I'd like it to be. I'm a bit mystified as to how the game decides when it's going to start a tunnel or bridge. It's not like you can tell it to dig here or there like you can with the original Rollercoaster Tycoon, but then that was a tedious, confusing set up that RCT had. RRT3 keeps things moving along and focuses on the financial model and connecting cities. Hook up those routes and make money so you can buy more industries and make even more money.

The game gives you a lot of information in the form of overlays and so forth. I'm still getting used to it, but it seems quite logical and most likely this will be one of the better strategy games to play online as there is no shooting involved and setting up your routes for maximum profitablility is going to make a big difference in how well you do. To be honest though I never played RRT2 online.

Some things that are lacking and there may be a good reason for this, namely they want the game to run well on a decent system. The things lacking are people, cars, traffic, that sort of thing. While the game looks good, it could look better with the things mentioned. RCT had tons of little people, but still the game was graphically much more primitive. It'll probably be a few years before RRT will have all the people and details you might like. For now you get numerous trains with their own sound effects, smoke, lots of industries with some working parts and so forth. The wheels on your train spin, but they're not 3d wheels.

Very fun & interesting, with huge replay value

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 15 / 15
Date: December 29, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I am an older player who really likes simulation/strategy games (I still play Panzer General II, which I believe was released in 1996!) This is the first game I have seen in years that has the ease-of-play, historical interest, huge replay-ability, and just plain fun factor of RR Tycoon 3. It is a fairly new game and they have already come out with three new maps (free downloads), which leads me to believe that I will be adding maps and playing this one for a long, long time.

The 3D views makes sense for this game (not like some games that get boring very quickly after the novelty of the "special effects" wears off). It is great to be able to zoom in an out of things easily, turn the maps, etc.

Railroad Tycoon 3 keeps the interesting decisions in the game, while allowing you to delegate some decisions (such as car consists) that can really get tedious to do manually later in the games.

Nice job Poptop!

Choo Choo

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 14 / 14
Date: December 11, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game for my husband for his birthday when it first came out. My husband loved RRT 2 and the expansion pack, so I thought this was a definite can't lose gift. And it wasn't. The graphics are great, the music is fun, and the ability to play online is great. (Not too many play online yet though, for some reason)

However, my husband who spent much of his life playing the previous game did not spend nearly as much time on this one. He says that he enjoys it, but I can tell that the thrill of this game is just not what it normally should be. I've tried playing it, and I know my husband misses micromanaging everything. It's become rather simplistic and much more about the stock market instead of the railroads themselves.

Unbalanced and unfinished

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 17 / 19
Date: November 20, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game has great potential, make no mistake about it. The economic model is a great idea, it creates a much more immersive environment. Cutting out micromanagement in my opinion was also a great idea, but I guess that depends on whether you're a big picture strategy gamer, or the micromanaging control freak. The new 3D engine looks cool, even though graphics are secondary in strategy games. By now you should expect a but coming, especially with two stars, so here goes. While the idea of true economic model is good, it is implemented all wrong. This creates for very unbalanced game, where one approach beats all scenarios, and there isn't any challenge to keep you occupied after the first 3-5 years of the game time, the game beats you by boring the hell out of you. There are also unprofessional screw ups, like the AI player that almost never challenges you and eventually goes bankrupt, or the fact that AI players like to buy electric locomotives, but somehow neglect to build electrified track, and electric locomotives tend to run poorly on Flintstone power alone. After you play this game for a while, you start wondering whether there was any beta testing done at all, there are so many things that should've been fixed way before the game was released. Pop Top has to go back to the drawing board and introduce some major changes in the patches before I could recommend this game, it's a mediocre rush-job in its present state. I would also be wary of buying any future Pop Top games without conducting extensive research beforehand.

An exceptional new instalment to the Tycoon saga

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 12
Date: January 02, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I am a huge fan of the Railroad Tycoon series, later shared with the Transport series, and I can say that this new instalment is outstanding!

The 3D option is terrific! You can almost jump inside the cabin of any train or follow its way with the camera fixed on it, rotating the view as you wish.

The game is really easy to play and very realistic. ie, passengers now travel only to cities and not to fruit orchards.

You have many scenarios or campaigns to play and if you just want to lay tracks and run trains there is a special option called "sandbox" which allows you just specifically that.

I do not give it a 5 star due to the lack of a good tutorial, not my case but necessary IMHO, and the editor is not quite easy to use.

I have not had any problem at all installing it, although I'm aware there have been problems. Read the technical specs prior buying it.

But, if you like trains this is game you should definitely have.

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