Fun little game that's easy to pick up. However, it is outclassed by Railroad Tycoon 3 also by Sid Meier. This one has less complexity weaker graphics and interface.

This is the only game that competes with the original Transport Tycoon! An excellent game which has been on sale at some ridiculous prices. However, please note that this game is rather old, and has dated well - but not perfectly. It still loads and runs fine, but it looks like a history lesson in video gaming! If you're after graphical splendour, this isn't the one for you.

I think this is one of the best games of this genre. It does lack a lot of depth that other similar games do have, but the games simplicity enabled me to expose my young daughters to this type of game. They were able to dive in and play, and over time began to comprehend some of the deeper aspects of the game. If you are interested in a simple and fun game, but are not familiar with railroad games; this is a must have.

I haven't played this much, maybe a couple of hours, and had it crash twice. Once when starting a map, and then again when I was just about to win. I'm pretty sure it's not a hardware issue, as I don't have problems with other games, and my drivers are up to date. So while it might be great fun, I don't feel like playing it.

While many train simulator enthusiasts complain that this version of the venerable Tycoon series lacks the depth that made the first Railroad Tycoon and it's successors so great, I really feel that there is nothing wrong with this version. A huge amount of fat has been cut from what had become an overly complicated mess of competing mechanics, resulting in an elegant and enjoyable new game. It has everything I loved about playing Tycoon, and none of the tedium that practically drove me crazy.

If you are obsessed with huge amounts of micro-management, give this one a pass. If you're new to the genre and want to be led in slowly, give this a try.

The best thing about Sid Meier's Railroads! is that is based on previous Railroad Tycoon games. The worst thing about Sid Meier's Railroads! is that is based on previous Railroad Tycoon games.

This is a friendly introduction into creating railroads, fulfilling supply and demand, and allowing some really nice networks, including bridges and overlapping track, all done in a simple way. Unfortunately, by making it simple, occasionally you get in a situation where the track layout you want is simply not possible, and trains cannot get where intended.

If all you want to do is link up destinations, kick back, and enjoy the satisfaction of realising these routes, then this is great. If you've played any of the previous Railroad Tycoon games (or Transport Tycoon), you'll be disappointed at the level of complexity displayed herein - it very much is a "pass A to B" game, and the finances are a much simpler model. That's not to say it's not enjoyable: the achievements on each map are well thought-out, and are genuinely something to work towards, but it does become a little bit samey very quickly, and before you know it, you've bought out all your competitors, linked up every destination on the map to one another, and sat there wondering whether you can be bothered to do the next map. If you can, you'll love this game, and you'll play it over and over (even if all the maps are pre-rendered, not procedurally generated). If not, you'll probably get six hours out of it before you're bored.

Great game for casual gaming, easy to learn and easy to control. For me better than Railroad Tycoon 3.

One thing you must know is that it runs on x64 versions of windows, but it may crash when laying tracks even patched to the last version released by firaxis. The solution i've found is a patched version of the executable on:

http://www.smrsimple.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/RailRoads.zip

Note that this patched executable is not supported by firaxis or gamersgate, so use it at your own risk. But as I said, at least for me it has solved my problems

Very simpflified Version of Railroad Tycoon 3. This is not neccessary a bad news - because of reduced complexity, a casual player has a chance to get into this game very fast and enjoy the success of building rail imperium. The "childisch" graphics is a matter of taste, I personally like it a lot and looking at the small trains is always a pleasure.

The biggest issue for me is the track-building - you will almost always get to the point, when the railroads seems like a big chaos and not like railroad network.

A simple transportation game that only relies as the name suggests on one type of transport, namely railroads. For players that have some experience with earlier versions of the railroad tycoon series you will immediately feel yourself at home. Although this home will look a bit like a kid`s playroom. The game overall has very simple mechanics, you build tracks, connects cities and resources. Transport freight, passengers and mail,invest in industries or technology patents. You got to make enough money to cover your costs, expand your empire and achieve the scenario goals. Overall a simple game that will keep you entertained for a while when you are not up to climb steep learning curves.

Veterans of the series might be disappointed a bit by its simplicity but overall the game works fine and plays well. Ber warned though with Win 7 64bit you got to tweak the game to run properly without crashes.

A solid 4 out of 6 (with 6 being the best)

Bearing Sid Meier's name isn't for any title. And this one makes up for the challenge: a great game with good graphics (for the time it was produced, and even average graphics for today standards) and great gameplay. The game is not just about laying tracks between cities and buying trains to haul cargo. It's deeper than that. You have stock shares, you can build or bid on industries, you have always new technologies being sold on the market (for wich you have to outbid your competitors) and so on. It's a great game for a great price. The game sometimes gets buggy (e.g. quits on the loading screen), but even if you take the bugs into account, the game is still well worth it's price. A true classic!

Pretty good game if it doesn't crash on you. At first I was crashing about every 10 minutes or so. Eventually I was able to fix it with a patched exe from here http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1090651 . Basically the issue here was it was trying to access ram it isn't allowed under new operating systems such as Windows 7. This game reminds me a lot of Industry Giant. The most troublesome things to get used to are that trains slow down under load and dealing with the sharp increase in stock prices once the publicly available stock is used up. Another thing is getting the track to go where you want to. Sometimes you have to take it a short step at a time because it wants to only curve in one direction per attempt to lay it down.Well Aside from these issues it is a decent game. Just give it a little time so you get used to how it does things.

Sid Meier's Railroads is one among the best tycoon games.Basically you are in charge of the company and have to connect cities and transport passengers and goods to make some money. To increase the fun you have competitors too who will aggressively try to put you out of the game. The game even goes further in depth by allowing you to own building and upgrades, buy wining the auctions. most of the time if you have too many opponents its hard to compete in the auctions.sometimes the game can get too tough if your opponent gains too many advantages, the best part is the game allows you to also manipulate the stocks of everyone which means you outright buy out the opponent and defeat him or him do the same thing, the graphics are awesome and smooth the multiplayer still works awesome highly recommended tycoon game.

Simplified and easier Railroad empire building game. I haven't played the RR type games in a while, but was a big fan of RR Tycoon and others when they came out a long time ago. I was pleased to see this one on sale, and bought it quick. I'm glad I did. The tutor starts you out fast, and is very easy to follow. The city buildings actually move out of the tracks way when you build into them, so you don't have to worry about in depth city planning. I really like this one a lot for a lighter game of a RR empire sim. Nothing groundbreaking to say the least, but a lot of fun.

Railroads! is a charming game worthy of the Sid Meier family. Although repetetive and lacking in depth, it is a thoroughly enjoyable tycoon sim. Multiplayer is problematic, as some players will inevitably end up with better starting locations than their rivals. The AI compounds problems further, tending to make unnecessary mistakes in the planning stages.

But between the rockabilly soundtrack, the cartoony graphics and the ability to beat JP Morgan at his own game, the game is rewarding. I can see this being ported to tablets in the future- it is of course, the perfect game to play if you have some spare time on the train.

This game is fun for a while. After the initial novelty of it wears off, it losses some of the appeal. But I find myself turning back to it every few months when I need to relax and play something simple and easy.

PROS:

1. Graphics - they aren't advanced or amazing, but there is something artistic about them that makes then fun to look at

2. Playability - you can always get a different outcome and there are countless strategies to pursue

3. Time commitment - you can play quite long or quite short game, making this a very flexible game

CONS:

1. Perhaps a bit TOO simple at times

2. The economy would be more complex to offer more options

There's some fun to be had in this game. I like watching trains deliver items from one station to the next, and I like setting up routes. There are a fair amount of different types of trains on this game and the graphics aren't too bad, but really I wish there was a little more depth.

The game really comes down to placing stations near outposts to collect goods then delivering them to cities that require the goods. You can also deliver passengers and mail from one city to the next. I had some fun with this game, but in the end I felt it lacking in the depth department. Still if you like trains I still think this is worth the buy.

If you have never played railroad tycoon series game, you may love this game because it has a lovely graphics and it is easy to get started. Compared to railroad tycoon 2 and 3, it is much less complex. Many things have been simplified. You can lay your tracks and build your stations very easily. For example, you don't need to build post office, restaurant, and hotel to increase the revenue of a station, just promote it to a higher level station, your stations will become more efficient and profitable. The stock market is also simplified. There is no dividend and the stock will not be splitted. You don't need to sell and buy stocks very often and still you can take over your oppoents easily -- just earn enough money and buy all the stocks of your strongest oppoent, and then you can handle the second and third oppoents. Different from the railroad tycoon, you need to bid for patents and factories.

The people who enjoy the "deep" economic mode of railroad tycoon may consider the economic mode of this game is oversimplified. However, for the beginners, I would say that this game is easier for them to get started. The intention of this game has shown in the trailer vedio that is to lay the tracks, build stations, deploy trains, and watch your lovely trains make profits for you easily so as to fulfil one of your childhood dream. I think the most serious problem of this game is its stability. As you get a great deal of tracks, stations, and trains the game becomes more likely to crash and the offical patch cannot fix this problem.

If you have played any of the Railroad Tycoon games this is Sid Meier's version. Better graphics and deeper gameplay set this apart from the tycoon games. The track and station setup seemed easier to me in this game, but this also could be my imagination. When you play the campaigns there is a time limit on achievements that makes the game somewhat challenging. The "help" icons when selecting what type of cargo your train is going to carry is a big benefit. Each city has certain imports it needs and certain exports it can provide. This takes some planning on how to set up your train route. Sometimes it can get complex in setting up cargo and routes when you begin transporting natural resources to towns from the "field". There are some sites that are not cities, but are areas that provide resources such as oil, grain, wood etc. This way you can transport these to towne that need them to produce exports. This is a very good "tycoon" game if that is your genre of interest, but I don't think this will help you to like the "tycoon" games if you don't already. I give this a 4 star because I do like this type of game and the only reason I don't give it 5 stars is because the time allotments didn't seem to me to be slow enough. Then again that could be my deficiency in strategy.

This is another of the games with trains and railroads. If you like trains and like making train models, this is just the game for you.

At first hand this game is awesome to play you don't have to learn that much about it before you can play it and there is a lot of different maps that you can play and you can also decide by yourself what year you will start in.

The trains in the game is all from the very early steam trains that are very small, and to the big electric trains from the 1900s.

I will recommend the game, but it is not a game you will play for 23 hours straight because it can get very boring when you have played it a lot.

As i said i will recommend it as a good game, because when it gets boring it has a multiplayer option so you can play with your freinds over LAN

Trains is a Real Time Strategy game where you need to outship your competition to make money needed to buy them out. The basic strategy is the same - set up passenger lines to subsidize your freight lines. The freight lines then cause industry to grow, which cause your cities to get bigger and demand more freight and more passenger destinations. You can have up to four separate lines at your main terminal, and other terminals you build along the way. As with the original Railroad Tycoon and sequels, you cannot use a competitor's track. At least in this game, you may build bridges over or tunnels under a competitors track to get to other cities, or even cities they service. I highly recommend this to any A-Train or Railroad Tycoon fan.

At first enjoyed the game but the constant crashing during multiplayer mode and how very easy it is to buy the computers out made this game an epic fail. Railroad Tycoon 3 was a much better game.

When buying Railroads I was expecting an improved chapter of the long lasting railroad simulation series. Instead I found out Railroads is barely playable due to bad AI behaviour. In a match with other PC-controlled players the map eventually become just a series of absurd tracks intersections.

For those who don't bother playing with low graphics games I reccomend going for Railroad Tycoon III instead.

Nonetheless Railroads, with its nice graphics and easy learning curve can be (for 2.46 euros!!) a pleasant way to spend some hours

By far the prettiest game in the Railroad Tycoon series, but not the best. The campaign modes are gone, replaced by a relatively small number of longer-running levels (admittedly, with more customization options for difficulty and randomization). Money is rarely a meaningful challenge in this installment, but train routing takes a frustrating turn, with an effort at increased realism soured by stupid AI manning the switches.

For pretty pictures and impressive-looking tracks, this is the best game in the series. For gameplay, challenge, an interesting story and a world that makes more sense, go to Railroad Tycoon II.

I found it was a good game but not realistick enough. The tracks would bend more then they should normaly and the land terraformed around the tracks rather then you having to build the tracks around the land. So if your looking for fast paced challanges this is a good game.

It can be said that Railroads is an "arcade" railroad sim. Compared to Railroad Tycoon, Railroads is much simplified, but without being shallow or even worse - it's different and it's good at what it's supposed to be.

The game is comprised of a series of (unlinked) scenarios based in the US, and other multiplayer-designed maps. You can play in "sandbox" mode or with objectives. The player must connect cities and move cargo around, which in turn causes the cities and industries to grow and require other goods.

The financial aspect of the game consists of buying and selling shares, and funding industry, by buying ones that already exist and building new ones. Some of the objectives require the player to acquire a rival or buy a certain number of shares.

The bulk of the game is setting the correct routes of the trains, either by setting intersections correctly or just duplicating tracks. A difficulty option may change the behaviour of the trains when faced with deadlocks, adding or removing realism.

Graphics are a bit improved over Civ4 and do their job. Soundtrack is absent, but the sound effects are nic enough.

The game is a nice distraction and recommended for those looking for a more light-hearted train simulator.

I find this a fun game. No problems with it at all. I owned the original from the 90's. This is a improvement from that original. I didn't think they could do it.