railroad tycoon demo

Nice, houdt niet zo van treinspellen, maar het is volgens mij een rustgevend spelletje, denk niet dat er veel mensen zijn die het kopen maar toch aardig dat er ook spellen in dit genre worden gemaakt. Altijd maar shooters begint ook wat te veel te worden.

ik heb een engelse review gevonden

bron: gamesdomain.co.uk

Ah, the thrill of transport. Most gamers don’t get it, but there’s a class who do. They’re fascinated with the power of steam, the story of how countries were connected and built by laying steel rails and wood planking, then setting huge iron monsters upon them. Vast distances crossed in days, tunnels bored through mountains, massive trestles crossing chasms and mighty rivers. A select handful of entrepreneurs became impossibly rich by taking the initial risks and connecting the coasts, condemning unconnected towns to economic obscurity, and transforming small lakeside hubs, like Chicago, into world-class metropolises. The world’s love affair with the railroad continues to this day, even if the rails aren’t as mighty as they used to be.

To the uninitiated, or the casual gamer, it’s hard to imagine how an economic and transport simulation can be fun. This isn’t a railroad construction set, like the Lionel model your dad had in the basement; though Railroad Tycoon 3 does ship with a sandbox mode, it’s a full bore and detailed economic simulation.

You can play the stock market, issue bonds, use competing companies’ rails to obtain important products, equip your stations with hotels, restaurants, breweries, tool and die factories, and much more. You can set priorities, devise routes, or let the computer figure most of this stuff out automatically. Your primary job is to connect cities, lay track, and set the trains onto the rails by planning their routes.

Railroad Tycoon 3 doesn’t offer the level of minute detail some fans craved, but there are quite a few changes in the coal car. The engine is now in full 3D and this makes laying track and scrolling around the giant maps even easier than before. You can intuitively dig tunnels now, as well as get a fix on where to lay track next. PopTop has cut down on the sheer number of station upgrades, but that’s to the benefit of the game. Now you can place industries and amenities instead. If two rail lines are servicing New York, the one who places a hotel closest to the city center gets the lion’s share of the profits, for example.

The developers also cut out some of the busywork as well. Trains are set to default “auto-manage” meaning you can let the engineer pick the best loads to take, plus use a slider to choose the minimum and maximum cars to pull. Also, add a caboose and you get automatic repairs when breakdowns occur, add a passenger car and you can avail yourself of tourism.

This changes the gameplay pretty dramatically. Now, if you don’t want to, you never have to pay attention to what types of cargo are available in each city and then micromanage accordingly. Just make sure you have trains covering each route, double tracks in high congestion areas, and enough water towers and maintenance sheds to keep your trains running, and you’ll do fine. Micromanagers can still rejoice because they can still pay close attention to key routes and pick and choose the most efficient/high profit loads for those routes.

There’s also the stock market. You build your company and you have company wealth and personal wealth. Personal wealth you can use to buy stock in your own company or in your rivals. You can really mess with their prices this way. When they get low enough, you can even merge or buy them out and take over their infrastructure. Or you can work with them to better serve your own customers; be warned, you’ll have to pay to use their track. You can also issue bonds to raise quick cash (this can be risky) and increase the dividend you pay your own stockholders. Most scenarios don’t require using the stock market to win, so you can almost ignore it if you’d prefer.

The game is split up into multiplayer, single-player campaign, scenario, and sandbox modes. The campaign is set up like a museum. You’re even given an old crotchety curator who guides you on your tour. The first few missions take place in the 19th century. The next room moves up to about WWII, then the modern era with electric trains, and then the future, where the hardest scenarios are. It’s a nice gradual slope to learn the game and gives a good survey of train history. Each mission has three levels of victory, with “gold” having the most demanding financial and time-restricted goals.

Multiplayer is interesting. It takes a hefty time commitment to complete a game, but the competition gets fierce. You can watch human players, as they approach one another, building track and stations just to block what they perceive are the other player’s long-term goals. Successfully undercutting another human company’s stock price is equally rewarding. Hopefully upon release, the lobby will fill with wannabe tycoons out to play financial warfare on the rails.

One benefit of the 3D engine is locking on and following a train along the route. Taking a trip from Chicago to Milwaukee, Albany to New York, or Indianapolis to Cleveland and watching the varied terrain found in all those locations is a real thrill. Seeing the sun set or rise along the route, watching lightning strike nearby, are all a big part of the fun of a game like this.

The audio is likewise fantastic. PopTop has always been wonderful about picking music and Railroad Tycoon’s folk-blues is a real treat. It’s a nice mix of banjo picking, harmonica playing, and the strumming of a guitar with a wailing voice backing it all up.

Railroad Tycoon 3 won’t win over some fans who prefer the more detailed economic model from the previous game in the series, but those that give it a chance will find it to be a muscular iron horse indeed. Can’t you hear the whistle blowing?

System Requirements

PIII-500, 128MB RAM, 16MB DirectX8 video card required

800Mhz or higher, 128MB RAM recommended

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(Z@3) +1

Ik vind het ook zielig dat jij elke dag 3uur zit te hartenjagen

ikm hou van die game