Railway Empire 2 Review (Overheal)
The map is so much bigger now Omg. You still can play on regional maps but the whole US/EU maps are pretty mind blowing.
Some of the day one reviews are needlessly harsh and these folks have low playtimes, leading me to think (just my 2c) it’s cold feet over the asking price and going in with the mindset you’ll turn it off before the refund window. You can currently get sometimes soft locked in tutorial that’s true but claims that “it’s just RE1 nothing new” is very much false, it’s very familiar to RE1 players but there’s a lot of new as well, eg. The ability to add hotels at a rural station between 2 cities so passengers and Mail transfer there instead of directly City to city. Warehouses are now an add on to the station so you don’t need entirely separate entities, making it easier to keep the network flowing logically at full scale across dozen so of cities and rural businesses.
Auto signaling, it has pros and cons. Pros: you never have to fiddle with signals when you merge or split a line anymore. You used to have to clean up these junctions so there were no short or overlapping Stop blocks that allowed trains to lock up the junction waiting for a train to get out of the way. On the other hand, not being able to manually place signals means you cannot place additional stop blocks on straightaways to allow empty trains to bunch together at farms and such.
On the other hand, you might want to rethink that old approach to farms anyway, as the tutorial spells out, if you have a farm between City A and City B, now instead of needing 3 lines between City-Farm-City, you can just use the 1 line between city-farm-city, using as few as 2 trains, and transport passengers mail and/or freight, including industrial goods, between all 3 using hotels/warehouse attachments at the farm. So in a lot of cases you might no longer want trains loitering at the farm waiting for a full load. What this means, ultimately, is you could build out a regional network without ever making a crossover line or needing to tunnel or bridge over your own lines, because everything can just be transported to the nearest node, whether farm or city or a station placed in the open. Which also means you can operate with fewer net trains overall. That's revolutionary, and eliminates the original's biggest late game headaches, especially as you scale out to hundreds or even a thousand or more trains.
But saying that, lines are easily laid, gridirons eliminate what was once a sometimes very finicky process of manually placing diamond exchanges (which sometimes could even crash you to desktop in RE1 if you hover over the wrong thing at the wrong time). And trains are much more easily managed by Train LINE not by TRAIN, so if you want eg 4 express trains between 2 cities, just add 4 engines to the line and they will automatically space out themselves, which is very neat because spacing trains in RE1 was a time consuming process that eats up the in game calendar. That also makes changes to the line far faster, if you need to move the express to track 3, all the trains get the same order to move you don’t have to repeat it for every train on the line, as you did before even if a line had a dozen or more trains running it. I won’t miss that!
The graphics and scale refresh are welcome, it’s not a revolution in difference but it’s a breath of fresh air, much more definition to landscaping, but the change from cartoon avatars etc to 3D uncanny-valley avatars is slightly off putting, this ain’t Tom Hanks Polar Express. But you can pan through the train interiors now which is sorta nice, the only thing is your camera is on an invisible rail, I would have preferred it to be more freeform looking around but I could see how as soon as the train takes a turn that would make it so eg. Your camera is clipped out of the dining car from the rotation. The fixed method allows you to see inside more neatly even as the train winds. Not a big hit or miss anyway as 99% of play is not in this mode.
The last complaint I think is silly is day 1 DLC: it’s not DLC for scenarios or game features etc it’s for ebooks not unlike the Prima game guides that used to be sold for gameboy games etc., you don’t have to buy it, the in game help menu has more than enough documentation to succeed at playing the game with. Those ebooks reportedly have a print version on the way too which sounds like better bang for buck. The guide just helps you cheese scenarios with walkthroughs and such.
Ultimately you cannot go wrong either way, RE2 will give an RE1 player new legs with advantages like 8 lane stations that RE1 doesn’t have (it feels incredibly choking to only have 4 lanes per city once you hit a few hundred network trains, and trying to build Station 2 in a city much later on is nearly impossible in many cases because of industries). Level diamond intersections between different runs of track eg. NS/WE are also possible to build which will lead to new ways to build your network out efficiently. However as warned about in the Help guide, this will only work at an angle, not at square/90-degree crossings. More like a >< than a X.
if you don’t have that full release/difference in price money to spend don’t panic, RE1 still has bargain value left in it, with a lot of challenging and tuned scenarios to play. RE2 builds on that with more in my opinion. I would still welcome the ability to add a means to have short blocks for empty trains, but other than that choo choo everyone. Choo choo.