RAILGRADE

On a high level, Railgrade is what you'd get if you took TTD's trains-and-cargo gameplay loop, made it 3D with elevated rails, and then gave the player objectives and a time limit. Each level essentially boils down to connecting industries (usually you have to build them yourself) to ship cargo from one point to another and to turn a profit by doing so, in order to fulfil some goal of the level. Usually this is either "Sell X units of some cargo" or "Grow a city to size Y", but there are a few curveballs here and there. What makes this last is the steadily increasing complexity of production chains. Some industries need more than 1 unit of cargo in per cycle. Some need multiple ingredients that must all be supplied. Many of them don't use raw materials, but the outputs of something in the previous tier of industry. The higher you go, the more steps, but the bigger the profit you get in the end, because you get paid for every delivery. A unit of copper ore is worth ¥32, but you can turn it into two units of copper wire for ¥32 each, for a total of ¥96 - ¥32 for the ore and then ¥64 when you deliver the wire. Which can be turned into something even more lucrative down the road. The main campaign has an excellent difficulty curve, starting you off just shipping around raw materials so that you learn the basics of placing tracks and trains. By the end of it you'll be building rockets and tier 5 industry products, and at no point will it feel like there was a sudden difficulty spike. The more you play, the better you'll get, learning how to lay track, stack elevated rails, placing industries, and more. Industries produce at a very specific rate so you'll need to do the math to balance them. Upgrades get exponentially more expensive so you're better off building more industries, but space won't always permit this, plus you only have a finite amount of workers to staff industries, so that's another balancing act. An excellent logistics game and highly recommended for anyone who enjoys OpenTTD and wishes there was a lot more to it.