Railway Empire 2 Review – Beautiful Railroad Simulator with Economic Focus in the Test

Railway Empire 2 will be the prettiest locomotive in the shed, but will it make enough speed to outrun its role models Railroad Tycoon, Railroads, and its predecessor Railway Empire? Railroad business simulations just got a whole lot prettier and more attractive.

Now it’s time for you to get the train rolling! In this Railway Empire 2 Test / Review I will show you everything you need to know about the new railroad simulation with beautiful Unreal graphics, a lot of economic simulation, and Railroad Tycoon-like gameplay, this time also with co-op multiplayer. Railway Empire will be released on 25.05.203 for Playstation PS4 and PS5, XBox One as well as Series X and S and for PC on Steam and in the Epic Games Store.

This post is available as text and a YouTube Video (German Voice-Over, English Subtitles). So you can choose how you like to enjoy it most.

Railway Empire 2 Review Video

German Voice-Over, many subtitles

Railway Empire 2 Review – Intro

Hello out there, Zap here. In this Railway Empire 2 review, you get some insight into the new railroad economic simulation game with lots of trains and pretty graphics. I’ll tell you how it is played, what’s in it and at the end you’ll get a rating from me. But most of all I want to give you all the info so you can decide for yourself if the game could be fun for you.

Railway Empire 2 is developed by Gaming Minds Studios and published by Kalypso Media. So far, there is a long list of games from this studio, with Patrician 4, Port Royale 3 and 4, and its predecessor Railway Empire, among others, with a particular focus on the economic sim genre. I received a free trial key, my thanks for that. However, this should have no impact on my review, as I always test all games with the thought in the back of my mind, how would I feel if I had paid full price?

Railway Empire 2 comes out with a release date set for May 25, 2023, on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One, Series X and S, as well as for PC on Steam and the Epic Games Store. A Switch version is also in the works.

Background – Role models and Railway Traditions

Back in 1990, Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon was released and there were some successors with parts 2 and 3 from other developers or later Sid Meier’s Railroad. 2018 then followed in this line an attempt by Kalypso and Gaming Minds to revive this old series with Railway Empire, and that succeeded quite successfully, I think.

With Railway Empire 2, I’ll call it more often RE2 from now on, this new edition is now modernized once again, at least in some sub-areas. But don’t worry, the flair of the old titles is still there and those who know the predecessors will find their way in the new game just as well. But there are some details that are different, and in almost all cases that’s good.

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Game type – historical railroad economic simulation

In RE2 you manage a company in the railroad industry. Most of the time, the maps are set between 1800 and 1900, so there is a strong focus on steam locomotives. At the same time, these games show the technical development of that time and the progress that our civilization has made thanks to the railroad.

We lay down tracks, build stations, buy trains, and set up timetables. Our trains then travel the routes, earning money that we can then invest in more tracks and more locomotives. So far, so simple. But the devil is in the details. The more complex our track systems become, the more often we run into problems due to train breakdowns, traffic jams, lack of goods, or even attacks and sabotage by our competitors.

The cities we send our trains to have needs that we can fulfill, and if enough goods and new people are brought into a city, then the cities grow as well. In the same way, we can invest in existing industries, expand them, or even build entirely new ones. So, over the years, small 100-people settlements in the middle of nowhere may become huge cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants with our help.

But almost always we have a supervisor who gives us tasks that we have to complete in a certain amount of time. Expand city A to size X, deliver goods Y to city B, and make sure that the competition doesn’t let us go down the drain, but rather the other way around. Through stock trading, we can even buy them up.

An important part is also to integrate often undeveloped areas into our railroad network and thus to cover the whole of Europe or the USA with our route network. We can even establish completely new settlements in certain places and let new cities grow out of the ground.

The locomotives we have on offer are as historically accurate as possible. Real railroad fans will find familiar names among the 30 models such as Grasshopper, John Bull, Derwent, or Tysson Ten-Wheeler.

Campaign and Scenarios

RE2 comes with 5 campaign levels. That doesn’t sound like much at first, but these levels are really substantial. Just in terms of playing time, these levels are about three to five times as extensive as the comparable levels from the campaign of the first part.

Where back then there were often only 3 sections for bronze, silver, and gold, now there are sometimes 5 or 6 sections with often 4-5 sub-objectives and additional optional objectives. So it happens that to complete a level you have to achieve 20 or more individual objectives. And the requirements of these goals are not necessarily made to be easy either.

Starting at campaign level three at the latest, it gets really tight with the time limits and requirements. I’ve already invested about 10 hours there alone, and still couldn’t crack the level because the time limits and the many different demands were so intense. And there is no difficulty slider for it.

So in my 50+ hours in beta and testing, I haven’t managed to unlock levels 4 and 5 yet. And actually, I thought I had quite a bit of experience with economic games in general and Railroad Tycoon and Railway Empire in particular.

But I will continue to fight at it, optimize, and will not give up. So here I can promise a long-term challenge if it doesn’t get frustrating at some point. I suspect, however, that not everyone will be able to play through the campaign straight away.

In addition, there are a total of 14 scenario maps spread across North America and Europe. Some of these are also blocked by the campaign missions. But at least after completing level 2, you have 13 of the 14 maps available.

In the scenarios, you can freely choose your character, but the parameters about difficulty, starting capital, costs, competitors, etc. are fixed. And in the campaign as well as in the scenarios, a high score list for each map lures as a challenge.

In addition, there is a “free play” mode, in which you can set everything the way you like it. And there is also a model-building mode. There you can just build without money, competition, and tasks. Nothing stands in the way of an endlessly huge railroad diorama.

Gameplay – Simulation – Trains, Research, Cities

Railway Empire, like its predecessor, offers a very extensive technology research tree. Over the course of 100 years, there are 25-30 individual researches in each of the 10-year sections that we can unlock. We get innovation points every month and can use them to gradually research nearly 300 individual innovations.

Some we need to unlock locomotives, but most end up giving passive bonuses, like lower resource consumption, faster dispatching of trains, speed advantages, cost reductions, etc. And many are also available multiple times and can then be stacked to get higher and higher bonus values.

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Railway Empire 2 Screenshot Gallery – Ingame Pictures (Part I)

Click or tap on the image for a larger view.
In the enlarged view, you can scroll right and left on the edges

Gameplay – What is new and what is better?

RE2 is of course a lot more modern, but it’s still very similar to its predecessor, which is now 5 years old, or its 30-year-old ancestor. On the one hand, this is great for fans of the old series, but on the other hand, I also see a problem, because not much innovation has happened in the now over 30 years.

There are nicer 3D graphics, a few new features have been added, and the track construction has been simplified and made more logical. But most things are still the same as they were back then. Even many of the menus look almost identical. And the interface still feels like it did back then, although nowadays it would certainly be much more convenient and clear.

New is the possibility to build up to 8-lane stations. Unfortunately, it is often pointless to build 4-lane or even wider tracks. At least if you leave the track planning to the automatic. Because the automatic train planning can indeed distribute the load at the station to the existing platforms with the railhead stations. But it can’t manage to distribute the trains on parallel tracks in order to avoid congestion and overloads.

Here, only manual planning of routes and placing waypoints on certain tracks can help, so that route A always goes left and route B always goes right. The game can do this, but unfortunately not automatically.

But let’s move on to the small detail changes that in the end bring Railway Empire 2 to noteworthy progress after all. There is good improvement in the most basic of all elements in a railroad simulation, namely the construction of tracks and stations. This starts with the terminus stations and the automatic signals. This was much more inconvenient and often illogical in RE Part 1.

There is now a good system here, provided that we think about not only building terminus stations but also defining directions for the individual tracks. Because, without defining a direction for the tracks, no signals will work. And if you forget one of them or even both, the trains in that area almost don’t run at all, without getting great warnings about it. But still, this is a big improvement compared to the predecessor.

Then, the track building itself has become much more comfortable in large parts. You can start track planning via single waypoints and then move these points on the plane as well as change the height via mouseover with shift+mouse wheel. This way tunnels and bridges are also created or avoided fully automatically. You can have a height grid displayed, which then makes it quite easy to avoid mountains instead of building expensive tunnels.

On a side note, the altitude grid mode creates a sort of pencil drawing effect in the cities as well, which looks extremely good. So I have this mode enabled sometimes just to look at the nice visuals.

Once you’ve built a track from one station to another, the game offers to instantly build a parallel track with one click, even multiple times if needed. Unfortunately, this function does not exist for partial tracks and only at the very first moment. If you try again later, this convenient help functions unfavorably and does not report again, and you then have to build by hand.

However, there is a handy snap function for the waypoints that allows you to “snuggle” a new track to an existing one so that they run parallel. This also makes track building much easier.

There has really been some improvement here in terms of ease of use and easier track building, I really have to commend that. The new implementation of the warehouses has some advantages as well because they are now integrated into the station, making it relatively easy to achieve goods distribution across multiple stations and cities. However, I find the limit of six goods a bit tight. But if there were too many warehouses, it would probably also get boring at some point.

Unfortunately, this warehouse used up one building slot in the station and these were limited to two. I find this very unpleasant, so I have mostly built a warehouse and a maintenance facility in the station, and the restaurant, post center, etc. remained absolute rarities. Why this path was taken is incomprehensible to me. You can build two stations per city, but this I find rather cumbersome. I would prefer an “all in one station” option.

Did I mention that Railway Empire 2 offers for each map and mission a highscore list that synchronizes over the net? That’s actually a pretty cool feature, so you can see where you stand compared to other players. This might also motivate some players to play some maps more often just to move up the list.

Multiplayer Coop

Railway Empire 2 offers a multiplayer mode. You can play all levels, maps, and scenarios in co-op multiplayer. So you can manage the same company together and build together. This is a very nice feature, but unfortunately, I couldn’t test it yet, because I only had one key. A total of up to four players per map should be possible.

That means you can invite other players into any game whenever you want. So you can not only convert a single-player game into a multiplayer game at any time, but you can also continue a multiplayer game alone afterward if the other players don’t want to play anymore. And if you somehow run into problems on a map, you can get your friends to help, and ponder and talk shop together about the problems.

In theory, this sounds very promising, provided you know someone who shares your fascination for railroads. Technically, crossplay has also been thought of here. So it doesn’t matter if your friends play on PC, Playstation, or XBox, they are all equally able to play together.

Tech, Graphics, Sound, Engine, Copy, Translation

Technically, RE2 is based on Unreal Engine 4, so the developers were able to go all out with the graphics, and they often did. RE2 is one of the prettiest business simulations I’ve had the pleasure of playing up to date.

The level of detail is enormous, and it’s fun to look across the landscape with the free-rotating camera, zooming down on small details or zooming way out to get the full view like on a map. And of course, because it makes sense, you can also ride along with the trains and thus enjoy the beautiful area even as a train passenger.

Technically, RE2 is absolutely stable. In my more than 50 hours of testing in beta and now with the release version, it didn’t crash once, and the number of bugs I saw I can count on two hands. Then I reported them and most of the bugs have already been fixed.

The soundscape is stupidly rather lacking for a game in this price range. There are all kinds of sounds, but most of them are only played when you zoom in far with the camera, but that is anything but varied. The whistling noises and the squealing of the trains are particularly annoying.

Sure, these noises are part of a railroad game. But since there are only a few of them, and they are also quite loud, this unfortunately goes more in the direction of annoying, instead of ambiance. With more different samples and a mix of somewhat more pleasant ambient sounds and less squealing and whistling, this would be nicer for me.

The texts are available in 12 languages. At least in German and English, they are written in high quality, unfortunately, I don’t understand the other languages. Voice output is rather rare and limited to mission objectives and comments from superiors and enemies, but when they come, it’s okay. Only the announcements of the AI opponents can be a bit annoying sometimes. You can adjust the frequency, but even at the lowest level, it is very repetitive and frequent.

How well does Railway Empire 2 run on the Steam Deck?

So far, there is no official rating for the playability on the deck now before release. Purely in terms of performance, it works well. The menus were small but still legible. In general, nothing should stand in the way of a green rating for the Steam deck.

What really bothered me, however, was that there was apparently no simulation of a mouse and keyboard for the Steam Deck, but you have to go with the gamepad version of the controls. For me as a PC player, this was very unfamiliar and awkward to use. But somehow you console gamers get along with it. However, I didn’t have much fun with this unfamiliar control system.

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Railway Empire 2 Test – Opinion and Conclusion

The game still has a few small bugs that are occasionally annoying. For example, why does a train pass an expensive maintenance post only to break down 100 yards away due to insufficient maintenance? Why do I get the “10 million invested in the stock market” achievement on Steam when I’ve invested just one million? And of course, the 100 million Achievement follows at the 10 million mark. Just a few small examples. But none of those is really severe.

The city’s growth is also not very logical in parts. In the campaign, I had the task to let a certain region grow. It lacked only 12500 inhabitants, which normally goes up quite fast in a well-supplied city. So I sent about 15 trains loaded with goods to the region and made sure that the needs of the cities were met as much as possible.

However, the calculation for this is a bit strange and then this leads to the fact that the city was only 58.3% supplied, and for sure there is no way that even a single person can move to this city. Even if hundreds of travelers arrive there every week. Nobody stays because the supply is below that threshold. But if at some point you reach 60 or 61%, then suddenly hundreds or thousands of people move into the city each week. Here, floating values would be better than such hard thresholds, in my opinion.

What bothers me quite a lot are the often long waiting times. I know this is relatively normal in economic games, that you sometimes have to wait to buy a new building or hire a new employee. With Railway Empire 2, however, it is somehow even more noticeable that I am constantly waiting. I build a few routes at the beginning, install a few trains, and at some point the cash register is empty. Then I think about the next route, plan its course, etc. But it takes forever till I can build it. So I wait and wait until slowly money comes into the cash register.

Somewhere there is a glitch in the balancing, which unfortunately reduces the enjoyment of the game a bit. Please don’t misunderstand me, it’s not that this would make RE2 not fun. But sometimes I felt like I’d like 1-2 more pacing stages, or I should somehow play a game on the side to bridge the waiting times.

Let’s move on to the topic of “innovation” in the genre. Almost everything that characterizes the railroad economic sim genre Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon has already done it in its first edition in 1990. And clearly, such a strong and imposing role model wants to be honored, and fans would bitch and moan if RE2 felt much different.

But still, I feel that besides graphics embellishments and greatly improved track building, there would have been a lot of room somewhere for a few more new features and some surprises in the gameplay. Somehow it could often be a bit more innovative, bringing more new ideas that would add variety to the all-too-familiar gameplay. Overall, I think Gaming Minds squanders some chances here to take the genre to a new level.

Of course, that’s kind of complaining on a high level. The fact is, RE2 is technically almost perfect, runs stable, and offers numerous challenges that make your head spin. Due to sometimes really crunchy tasks with tight time constraints, it might even get a bit very hard here and there.

But for all fans of the genre who like to send trains through the countryside in order to do business with them and build an increasingly large railroad empire, RE2 actually ticks off all the checkboxes. It doesn’t leave much to be desired and transfers the railroad tycoon genre to a new generation that doesn’t need to hide behind its predecessors.

The game offers many small improvements and positive points, which I have already mentioned in the section “What’s new” further ahead, especially in track building. Even if I was cursing or frustrated by waiting and failing here and there, RE2 has always motivated me to start again and take on the challenge once more. That’s a very good sign of long-term motivation, I think.

In conclusion, Railway Empire 2 offers a great overall package and a lot of fun and lasting entertainment for business tinkerers and railroad fans. You can’t say much negatively about the price of $50 or €. For that, you get easily 100 hours of gameplay and, with multiplayer options, maybe even more.

As an outlook into the future, there is on my wish list that there should also be a map editor or random maps, which would be a great expansion. And somehow one or two more speed levels would be great to reduce waiting times.

Otherwise, I’m sure there will be numerous of the usual continent DLCs again, with new maps and missions. I kind of see that with one laughing eye and one crying eye, but at least it’s guaranteed that some content will still follow.

Railway Empire 2 Review – Rating

For a price of $50 or €, Railway Empire 2 offers the full package of the railroad industry and economic challenge. Everything is presented in modern graphics and spiced up with optimized track construction. For this, I would like to give RE2 a basic rating of 84%.

Since it actually delivers everything as expected and desired, but also doesn’t do much particularly outstanding, there are no deductions, but also no bonus points this time. Which makes 84 % the final rating in this Railway Empire 2 review.

Outro

Do you like tricky business simulations and steam locomotives? Or does all this not offer enough innovation and long waiting times don’t sound great to you either? Feel free to write me your opinion in the comments or in the Community Discord.

You can find more gaming news, game reviews, and guides on the YouTube channel or at https://zapzockt.de – thumbs up, subscribe and share with friends won’t hurt, and then I wish you a great day, ciao ciao, your Zap

Links and Sources

Railway Empire 2 Steampage

Railway Empire bei Epic Games kaufen (Affiliate Link)

RE2 Website

Railway Empire 2 Playstation Store

Railway Empire 2 Xbox Store

Railway Empire 2 Screenshot Gallery – Ingame Pictures (Part II)

Click or tap on the image for a larger view.
In the enlarged view, you can scroll right and left on the edges