Railway Empire 2 Reviews

Good game, they really improved shortcomings from the first part. You should play the tutorial to get to know the new mechanics, but otherwise, this is a fun train game.

Played the s*** out of RE1 and loved it, this game is a great successor. Improves upon A LOT of track building aspects, the city building and economy aspects are improved as well. 5/5

Potentially worth it if on sale for under $20. I'm interested in these types of train management games and this one caught my eye. Sadly, it was a little too much like it's predecessor in that there are a lot of little things that add up to a frustrating game. The bad pathing intelligence creates some frustrations that I haven't discovered a decent solution for yet. Each way I try to make management a little simpler or more efficient seems to discover a new batch of issues. And, on top of the problems with how the game figures out it's paths is the maintenance and supplying of trains. For some reason, trains do not get sand, water, or oil when they stop at a station. Those things require another stop that needs to be added along the tracks somewhere. So trains take up station spots while being repaired (because going into the maintenance depot you bought is unrealistic, I guess) and then it goes on to the next station only to stop and get sand/water/oil refilled while blocking trains on the tracks the whole time. On a whim, I tried a pull off supply station to see if trains would use that, leaving the primary tracks open, but that failed as expected. I do like the look of the game and I think the growth mechanics work well. Creating track paths is, overall, pretty good although setting direction and gridirons gets tedious. The tech tree, or tech line (not any branches to follow on this tech tree), could be removed and the bonuses/unlocks just given at certain time intervals. It serves no other purpose than something to check back on to see if enough points were accumulated to get the next unlock. I recommend Transport Fever (1 or 2) over this. The few things this game does better than TP 1 or 2 are quickly overshadowed by it's issues and frustrations.

Too simplified with the track building. Was hoping for something closer to the trains from transport fever 2, but with competition. Graphics are nice, though.

Love this game. It's simple, easy to pick up and play.

It's not a highly technical real-world train SIM. It's not a super dumbed-down kiddy game either. It's somewhere in between. Great game for people who simply like trains and don't want to be weighed down by extensive controls, mechanics and management. Has it's flaws but improved upon the 1st is almost every way. Main Campaign is a little boring and easy. Scenarios got me addicted and some can be quite the challenge.

An improvement over the original Railway Empire in every aspect. Very enjoyable.

If you have Railway Empire 1 stick with that, if you haven't and like this type of game get that instead. All Railway Empire 2 has done is add some glossy bits, solved some of the annoyances of 1 but created some much worse ones.

I love this game franchise. That being said, Railway Empire 2 is still buggy as of march 2025. As soon as cities start to get big, trains get stuck at station with no ways to unstuck them. Other trains get stuck behind and its a snowball effect, soon you have 20 trains getting in the way of other routes and its global paralysis. Another draw back is speed. Campaign are very long and even at full speed, things are slow. I tried different strategies to bypass these issues with no big success so far. Still a decent game, hopefully patches will fix these but so far it looks likes it's getting worse with more expensions. I recommend this game but not at full price. Wait for a sale like I did.

Game is just not scaleable.. if you have more than 5 trains on a rail line they will sit and queue for months waiting on each other to go when there are 5 parallel empty tracks.