Train Tycoon

Train Tycoon is a simple browser/flash tier railroad tycoon game. Run a train business, manage your budget, expand your empire. It's a great idea for a game (and has been tremendously successful in actual, properly built games). Unfortunately, in the case of Train Tycoon, the art assets and interface are extremely clunky and simplistic... I've seen better interfaces written in HTML. And there are better games you can play for free on the web. The quality here is just far too low for this to be recommendable to anyone. If you're looking for this kind of game, try Train Fever or the older Railroad Tycoon games.

This was on my wishlist for a while now and my friend bought it for me while it was on sale. However, I wouldn’t have bought it in its current state. It’s a good concept; not enough features, mildly buggy and inaccessible, but I can still see myself playing this based on the capabilities it has right now. I’m not sure if this is supposed to be an idle game or not but I’m a fan of idle games in general so I went into this positive. I like most of the options available, but it’s needs to be more fleshed out and have more content in it. Buggy -The pause button doesn’t work. -The “End of day report” and the Accounting page in “Financial” has a small translation error. It says “Receipts” instead of income, revenue or a similar word in the English version. I don’t think this is technically considered a bug but I wasn’t sure where to put this under. Inaccessible/Confusing -Can’t access the character’s needs in easy, medium and hard mode. But the game says that we should be keeping these meters satisfied to avoid dying. I went over 100 in-game days and never knew where to find this meter. If there’s an option to access it, I don’t know where it is and I didn't get an game over screen for neglecting my character. -In the “Document” section, it doesn’t say how to level up offices. I eventually figured it out once I had enough money to upgrade the buildings (the colour is yellow and not greyed out so I didn’t immediately see it) until it turned green after I had enough to buy the upgrade. This isn't inherently a huge issue until it's combined with a not-so-smooth UI system. I'm used to playing games with rougher UI's so that didn't deter me from playing, it might for others. --------------------------------- A few ideas for features: Financial/Accounting -Add an investment calculator feature that shows how much money will be earned from the interest over the course of a few days. -Add decimals when repaying loans and investing/withdrawing money. Contracts -Have an estimate on the chances that the players will have the contract accepted or denied. Settings and Other Features -The ability to change the 24 hour format to 12 hours and vice versa. -Making the words and icons bigger and smaller on the screen. Because there is nothing but a black background while playing the game itself, it would be nice to make the icons itself bigger to take up more of the screen. -To change the background screen in the actual game (not just the main menu). However, it looks like the developers are already working on adding more since beta versions are available. -Have an option to see the “End of day” report at any time that day. I’ve accidentally closed it out without reading what happened to the driver and the next few days didn’t tell me that the fuel was empty and needed to be refilled. -Being able to start from a previous save while playing on easy mode after going bankrupt and a penalty on medium difficulty instead of having the file deleted without warning. As a Minecraft player, this didn't enrage me. However, it was definitely jarring. --------------------------------- Again, the game isn’t bad. It should have more features to keep it fun. Not specifically the ones I’ve listed, just in general. It looks like this game is in early development (version played: 1.0.0.0) and less than a year old at the time that I’m writing this review, which means that more updates are likely to happen so I’ll check back in the future. I don’t think that this game was meant to be an idle game since there’s an option to skip to the next day, but I can see why some people would think this game was meant to be one. There’s currently not a lot of active things to do in the game after getting the train to run at so I think it’s expected for players to speed up the time after everything is set up for the trains to move. Right now, I can recommend the game for people who like casual and management games and don't require a lot of complex systems. Although the game does get challenging after more than one train is in use. There’s also mod capability. That's definitely interesting.