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Railroad Tycoon 3

The most immediately noticeable fact about this third iteration of the Railroad Tycoon games is that it's gone over to 3D. Now the trains are animated models, steaming under fluffy clouds and sunsets and starry skies, through quaint little towns and rolling terrain, into and out of tunnels, over bridges spanning fancy water effects. Seasons pass, night falls, and you can zoom out far enough to get a broad overview of the playing field. It looks very nice and brings computer train games that much closer to their roots in model railroading. But this also raises some new problems. The illusion of model trains, much less real trains, is hobbled when trains pass through each other on a single track or fold over on themselves after pulling out of a station to go back the way they came in. Hopefully PopTop will come up with some clever tricks to hide these sort of visual pratfalls.

As for the gameplay, the operative word in this third iteration is 'streamlining'. Although this might be a cause for concern among those of us who enjoyed the depth of Railroad Tycoon 2, it should open the series up to casual gamers. The basics of gameplay seemed to be simply laying tracks, buying engines, and sending them on routes. You could set broad parameters for cargo (all freight, all passenger and mail express, or a mix of both), but the specifics of which car is carrying what stuff were automated.

Daaayamn

So purrty

So sad

PopTop showed a few views that displayed the data running under the graphics. There's an economic model at work that grows cities based on the flow of goods and people. You can influence this by building industries to encourage traffic and expansion. As cities grow, you can drop in buildings like hotels to cash in on the additional traffic. Multiplayer games will allow plenty of in-fighting as players build routes and structures to try to cut into each other's business. And what Railroad Tycoon game would be complete without a stock market?

If you were one of the handful of people who played Strategy First's overlooked gem, Rails Across America, you've seen how well this sort of high level strategic perspective can work with a railroad game. By building it into a fancy 3D engine, PopTop is taking Railroad Tycoon into new terrain, literally and figuratively.