Railroader

I've played over 180 hours since July 1st and am thoroughly enjoying the game. For background...I've been playing railroad simulators/games since the early 1990's...starting with the Micro Prose Railroad Tycoon franchise and Microsoft Train Simulator, then the Auran/N3V Trainz Railroad Simulator (TRS) franchise and Train Simulator on Steam. Some were operation-oriented, others with a focus on route-building and some combined features of both. All of them have been enjoyable for one reason or another, with technological advances bringing more and more realism (and opportunities for challenges) with each new product or release of an upgraded/improved version. Nonetheless, RAILROADER has really become the most enjoyable of all those that I've used. It's a 1st person experience with incredible "realism" in many respects. The high-fidelity surrounding environment, including scenery and structures, the exceptionally high-quality rolling stock models and the game physics make it as close to experiencing the day-to-day life of a railroader in the "good old days" that I could wish for (for now I'm sticking with the steam era). To be sure, I do wish that there were other characters in the world (I am only a single player). It would be especially nice to have a fireman in the cab with me (and a crew in the AE cabs) as well as people around the depots (plus passengers in the cars instead of empty seats) and workers in the businesses and industries. I also find that the limited number of buildings, particularly the lack of residential areas and the "blank" logging camps, is somewhat annoying...the world is very empty of people and contains only a little evidence of human activity. I recognize the developers are few in number and focused on other improvements; so, despite those shortcomings (IMHO), I definitely find the game to be challenging and rewarding; I look forward to further development and new releases to come and definitely recommend the game to others.

Great ! This game gives you a lot of agency to do things they way you like. Basically at the start you are given a railroad that isn't complete and has been damaged by floods, the first 20 hours or so you will come to grips with the UI , how things work, It was confusing to me at the start, however as you continue to play you develop a natural intuition of what is going on. Slowly you start taking contracts for companies that send freight to your interchange, it's upto you to get each car to it's destination. There is no time preasure, but you can treat it like a giant puzzle when you need to shuffle the cars around in the yard to consolidating the cars in a logical order to drop them off. There is a lot more going on, you need to manage your trains conditions and fuel logistics, you need to have coal, water at your depots ready. This doesn't put any preasure on you, since you just ask yourself, do I have enough of this stuff? If not, just order some more. As you slowly start to fix the railroad and build the bridges, you start to handle more freight, every day you start to add more to the total work and once this happens you have switched out the yards a few times already so you know the layoutds and where things need to go, you figure out how to do those tasks in a better way. Honestly, this game is really relaxing to play, you put on some podcast, or youtube video in the background and you train away. A lot of the tedium can be allocated to the AI so you can focus on a more macro scale but at the same time, if you feel like you need to do things manualy at any given moment, you can do that aswell. If you love trains, automation, things like euro truck sim or ATS, this will suck you in. Can't wait to see more things added in the future, I'm not so keen on the modding side, as I believe that starts to fracture the game into many difference areas, but the developer adding more content to the base game would be great! There are hundreds of hours to play here before you can finish it, doing things on default settings and not going into sandbox and giving yourself everything, just take your time and enjoy building the company from nothing.

It is a fun game, not a great game, but a good game nonetheless. The problem with Railroader as it stands right now at the time of this review is performance drops, gameplay issues, and lack of proper modding support. The way the game is built makes it so a certain amount of cars can be spawned into the map at once, something like 500 or 600 cars, before the frames start tanking. I've had a few saves become borderline unplayable once the cap is passed, multiplayer also becomes impossible as clients will drop no more than a few seconds after joining. Lighting within equipment can also bog down frames if one too many lights are left on, or you could be watching one of your longer freight trains run and have your frames go from buttery smooth to a slideshow in a matter of seconds, and god forbid you even dare exist around Andrews. The in game economy feels stagnant, like there isn't much going on around you to drive the economy forward. All customers receive cars relative to the rate they turn them around. If a coal mine received 20 cars and exported all 20, they'll get the same amount every day until you change the contract. Customers won't get very little cars one day, a lot the next, and a stable amount on any other day. You can easily predict your workload as you see cars finish across the map. Ai isn't smart, you find yourself questioning why it even exists as the waypoint engineer from Bryson on his way to Sylva wyes it's train in Whittier so it can shove the rest of the way. The waypoint system also doesn't have any sort of queuing so you can't give them x amount of instructions to the crew so you can fix another mess while they take car of sorting a train. Modding is a scary beast when it comes to this game. With no official support the modders are left unchecked on nexus, meaning someone spiteful who wants to make a political statement can exclude people from the US from playing with nearly all track mods because orange man bad. Until the game gets official support, the Railloader drama won't be the last big drama to come out of a surprisingly toxic fanbase. Now that I have spoken at length about the bad, the game is what this genre of train simulator needed. You don't have to pay $40.00 so you can get the brand new Alarka DLC with a brand new locomotive (that is exact copy of another engine in the game). Running trains doesn't feel pointless as it's your car deliveries that allow your railroad to grow. While I did complain about modding, there are a lot of really talented people out there who've made incredible additions to the game that make you question why it wasn't in the game in the first place. Railroader is exactly what is set out to be, a multiplayer train game where you and your buddies can run a model railroad together online. You run the railroad the way you want it to, you can set the scope of the line to include what you want and don't want. You're not forced to do anything and there are so many different ways to play the game. Railroads Online walked so Railroader could run and as content gets added to the game, Railroader will be remember as fondly as the titans in this genre like Railroad Tycoon 3 and Sid Mieres Railroads. As of right now, Railroader is a 6.75/10. Once the game is polished and issues are addressed, the game could very well be a 9/10 or even a 10/10.

I came to this game as an avid Transport Fever player who was dissatisfied with MS Train Simulator and Trainz New Era, and I am glad someone finally hit the sweet spot between those types of games. The train driving mechanics are in depth enough to actually feel like you are in total control of your train without feeling like I need 30 years of real life experience to get moving. Added to that, having to manage a business with contracts and equipment gives a sense of purpose to how you run your trains down the line. To be fair, the pace of the game is much slower, and I find it is taking some time to build up my railroad to higher capacity operations. So far, I have just been exposed to running smaller handfuls of cars to each customer along the line, and spotting the cars can be tedious and require some forethought. But I suppose that is how real railroads work, and this game gives you a taste of that without making it feel like a second job. I think to alleviate making it feel like work, it would be helpful to have a bit more automation. The autoengineers are good, but still require the player to step in regularly. I wish I could assign a train to a crew and timetable, and then pre-plan the moves to orient the train in the right direction on the desired track without having to do that on my own. I have yet to build signals, so I am holding out hope that they may help run things more smoothly. Another main criticism I have is that the grip points on the controls in the train cabs are clunky sometimes. For example, I will click and hold on the brake/throttle/whistle, and I guess I don't always click in exactly the right spot to operate them. Then if I click and drag to operate the controls, the way I drag is apparently not in the correct direction to move the control through the entire range of motion. I find that I can trust the UI on the bottom left of my screen to allow me better control of my train, but what is the fun in that when I'm sitting in the cab? Lastly, I am looking forward to further optimization and aesthetic improvements before the game is out of early access, so I don't feel like it is fair to criticize much of that at the moment. I only want to say that the skybox and lighting need some improvements. Overall, I think this game is great. With continual improvements, I can see myself sinking many many more hours into it.

Decent game, Still needs ALOT of Polish, even with my System it can drop to like 20fps alot of the time for seemingly no reason. And be warned the Community around it are VERY toxic, don't bother with their Discord or anything, especially if you aren't a Super Genius when it comes to trains. The devs also aren't around much at all, Im not sure if there is even development being done to the game these days, they have been promising that MOW update for over a year now and there is still no sign of it.

While the game is fun it is terribly optimized and multiplayer doesnt really work every well with more than 5 people. The lack of communication between devs and players is getting frustrating and the player base is pretty much dead until either a new mod comes out like Beemans mods or a new update drops. If the devs decide to optimize while adding new features i will change my review as the state of the game right now is not enjoyable.

I bought this game four days ago and I have already sunk 40 hours into it. It's become a minor (okay, not so minor) obsession. I'm not sure I've ever been as swept up in any game as I have in this one. I'm normally very skeptical of any early access game with "Overwhelmingly Positive" reviews, especially when it's not one I've seen any kind of buzz about on social media. But in this game's case, the overwhelmingly positive reviews are very well deserved. I've been a fan of games like Train Sim World, Transport Fever, and other such games for a very long time, but this game in particular scratches an extremely specific itch: it's mostly just driving trains, but it has just enough of a management/"tycoon" aspect to give the game structure and give your simulation experience some PURPOSE, which a lot of the more hyper-accurate simulators don't really do. This one, to be clear, is NOT hyper-accurate (at least not yet); the train controls are simplified - you can do pretty much everything with four sliders (though those four sliders are satisfyingly mapped to their "real-world" analogs in the simulated locomotive cabs in first person view), you don't have to worry about things like boiler pressure or understanding how to flick all the right switches to start up a diesel locomotive. That's not a complaint, though; that makes the game less intimidating than a lot of the rail sims I've played. It's still early access, and it shows in some ways - the scenery leaves a bit to be desired, and the in-game world, for all of its enormity, feels a bit empty (passengers in cars are represented by numbers and not actual models, no people standing on platforms, no cars on roads and at crossings, that kind of thing). I have every confidence that the map's look is going to improve (and as an artist, I appreciate that this developer hasn't embraced the AI slop that a lot of devs have), but the truth is that even if the game never progresses at all beyond its current state (which seems doubtful - this game's developer tends to respond to a lot of community threads and seems very communicative and attentive), I feel like it's been money well spent even as-is. Excellent game - absolutely worth all the praise it's gotten here on Steam, and it definitely gets my recommendation. I can't wait to see how it develops from here!