Railroads Online

I have been putting this off for 3 years and a day. I bought this game on Christmas day at around noon in 2021, and I remember being so excited: I'd been watching Kan Gaming's play through of it, and that prompted me to buy the game for myself and a friend. I remember it so clearly: playing into the wee hours of the morning on New Years so I could get the Heisler, and it was the old model, too. Since then, oh my has this game become a nightmare. The developers don't seem to care about the game, but that makes sense: the old dev team left in 2022 due to frustrations with the lead developer. Still, then I had hopes for the game, and I still enjoyed playing it. After the game updated to Unreal 5 and the new splines had been introduced is when I started to lose that hope. A game that I had taken the time to learn the system of changed a core aspect of the game play, dumbing it down to a point that took all of the joy and satisfaction out of laying track. The old system took time to learn and perfect, while the new system was more noob-friendly. At the time, I saw this as a positive thing: it would bring more people to the game I was still mostly enjoying, all while making it easier to connect industries and move faster. I miss that now. From that point onwards, this game has felt like a gut-wrenching roller coaster with no sense of reason behind anything. Multiplayer, from what I have heard from friends who play with me, is still unfinished, let alone polished. Sure, it has become much more tolerable in the past couple updates, but that doesn't stop it from being mediocre at best. Then comes performance on my end: I own and operate a Corsair ONE i300 with a liquid-cooled RTX 3080 and 64 GB of ram and there are still times that I struggle to maintain 30 FPS in this game. This computer can run AAA titles at maximum graphics settings and maintain 60-120 FPS, and it can't run this train game at 30. That should say something about the games' optimization. Moving on from that, we come to game play. After playing this game for three years, I can safely say that I am sufficiently bored with it; one can easily tell that when seeing another yeet trains into orbit with water towers. But most of my complaints come down to the core aspect of the game: industries. The first thing one does in this game is build a line from the logging camp to the sawmill, the two starter industries that give the player the roots to all other industries in the game. All one needs to do to load a car is to left-click on a crane and let the goods load, before charging off to the next destination, right-clicking on the cargo, and running back to start the whole process anew. This gets old fast. I've been doing this for 3, yes, three--- THREE YEARS. It has not changed, and there has been no statement from the dev team that it will change. If one has bought this game and is now reading this review, congratulations, you have just spent 35 USD on a game that is so repetitive that not even moving the industries helps. Not even laying track is fun anymore because of the aforementioned change to spline laying. And by the way, driving trains in this game requires about as much skill as playing artillery in World of Tanks, that being diddly squat: open the throttle wide and notch up the reverser so one goes fast and then be bored for the next 15-30 minutes. Peak entertainment, so much fun is had, said no one as one tiredly stares at the running gear, spinning in its endless waltz around the axles. I'm not even going to cover the disastrous release into V 1.0, because will just draw this whole thing out. In summary, this game is not worth 35 USD, it's not worth 35 Euros, it's not worth 53 CA on the PS5, because that's a thing I found out today! This game is one that, with my experience, I would hesitate to spend 5 USD on it, DLC's included. If one desires a good, multiplayer train game, look into Railroader, or wait for Cenutry of Steam. Why those two? Well, just to start, the dev teams actually care about trains. Sure, Railroader is not a simulator of any type, but it is a good placeholder for those who cannot afford model railroading as a hobby. Railroader nails the joy and mind games of running a railroad with one's buddies and having fun. Century of Steam, on the other hand, is being made, ironically enough, by a few members of the original dev team from Railroads Online, and it's being made by the ones who care about the history. CoS is promising steam simulation and multiplayer, and looks to be as fun as Railroader, if not more. Sure, it hasn't even been released yet, but no matter what, keep an eye out for it: it will likely be a good game, and will likely be cheaper than this one. Alright, I've ranted on enough and need to go grab a metaphorical glass of water. I doubt anyone is going to read through this entirely, and I don't blame them, but if one is just skimming, read this: DO NOT SPEND MORE THAN 10 USD ON THIS GAME, IT IS NOT WORTH IT. Thank you to anyone who actually did read through that, you're a legend. Cheers folks, Forest.

Its (fittingly) a trainwreck of a game and with such a messy and dirty development history that i really regret not refunding it in time. DO NOT BUY! TREAD ON OWN RISK!

The bugs were tolerable in early access and the game had great potential. Now that the game is fully released, the bugs are unacceptable. Multiplayer has been broken for over a year and there has been no communication from the devs. This game has now been abandoned. Either wait for the original RO devs to release Century of Steam to release or spend your money elsewhere, avoid Astragon games though.

Do not buy, as far as I can tell it's abandonware at this point. NOT WORTH THE PRICE compared to other games.. IF YOU WANT TO BUY FOR MULTIPLAYER BEWARE, ITS REALLY JANKY AND RIDDLED WITH BUGS, DOES NOT WORK AS ADVERTISED. Game is partially unfinished, not a sim, gameplay loop gets incredibly boring after a while, no built-in sandbox mode, no post-purchase locomotive editing, no passenger service, no quests/contracts, among more issues. If you want a full sandbox experience for this game, the only way is to use a savefile editor and give yourself a million dollars and 100,000 exp. Would only recommend you buy this game if you don't care about any of the above and want to drive trains, or you just want to ♥♥♥♥ about with your friends for a few hours. The only reason I have so many hours in it is because I'm not gonna spend another 30$ on Railroader even though that would be in my best interests.

Abandon all hope, yee who enter here. Dead and sloppy game. Development was a total mess, and I even was insulted by a dev named Thomas. Turns out he was a useless engine after all.

I had high hopes for this game. ive played it since the spline update. it was a solid game with a good premise. devoplment was decent untill the recent 1.0 release, since then its as it they hit a wall. communication is less than great, the community can be toxic. multiplayer is all but unplayable. since the change to the unreal engine the game has only gotten less and less stable. they spent over a year implementing new locomotives, props, maps, etc., all while the game was fundementally broken. they prioritised polishing this turd while stringing us along saying the bug fix was coming with 1.0, which then released even more broken. tldr; if you want to just build tracks and layouts how you want, decorate little towns for no reason, and move materials around with trains that have somewhat decent physics, this is an okay game for 20 bucks. that being said, its not 20 bucks, the online play is buggy and broken, you will experience bugs, poor performance, frustrating menus and build methods and pointless, endless grind. i wasted almost 1000 hrs in it. if it had some story, a point, or even just better more stable performance, id recommend it. if its on sale for 10 bucks, and you need a game to zone out to, this is alright i guess.

I do NOT recommend this game at all! This game a screw you to the train community. This is a FINISHED product in the minds of Stefan and Astragon. A finished product?! Are you guys out of your mind?! There are so many missing features! So many missing QoL features, and so many things in this game that make zero sense. Why and how does a tree sapling that a HUMAN could just step on and break like paper cause a locomotive to derail?! How do you mess that up?! Why the hell does it whenever you buy multiple cars they spawn 7 feet apart?! Why do cars just randomly derail when you are doing only 20 mph in a curve that can be taken at 50+ mph?! And last but no least, how the hell does a TRAIN with 40k TE not be able to pull 20 EMPTY flat cars up a 3% grade?! Yet a train with only 28k TE can?! THIS GAME IS NOT DONE AND DO NOT BUY THIS. It a piece of train game garbage that needed more time to bake and needed much more work. If this is a finished product in their minds. I can't imagine what the future of their games will look like. DO NOT BUY THIS. I solely regret giving this publisher any of my money and my time on their garbage of a train game.

This game is an abandoned, buggy mess, please, save your money, don't buy this game, if you want an actually good train simulator Derail Valley both supports VR and has an enticing game-play loop and still gets major updates including train customisation and driving. Railroader is also a far better use of your money, its more of a top down strategy/logistics simulator but has multiplayer that actually works, industries that make sense as well as the ability to populate the map with AI trains other than your own and control the territory through CTC. If I can prevent one person from wasting £25/$30 on this broken, buggy pile of hot garbage I'll be happy Alternatively wait for Century of Steam when that releases, though that may be a few years from now but already promises to be a far more feature complete, fun. and in depth experience than Railroads Online will ever be