Railroad Pioneer Reviews

The game give a good feel for railroad building and commerce and can be very challenging. The bad part is that there is no auto save so if something happens while playing, you have to start over.

You might as well buy the disc copy by Sold Out Software which does not need steam. The steam verison is not stable and crashes alot... and I mean alot. I only played 3 mins of the steam verison and I crashed 3 times!!! I refunded it and gonna stick with my disc copy, its more stable.

I only gave this game a positive rating because of nostalgia, and being one of the first games I ever played as a kid. Honestly, I can't really recommend playing it now. I'm not saying Railroad Pioneer is a bad game - I really enjoyed it, and it runs pretty well despite it's age. However, this game is roughly-made: lacks basic polishing, has quite a lot of oversights and a barely functioning AI. I can only recommend RP to those want to play an older lesser-known railroad simulation game, and those who want to try this genre with a cheap and easy game. Railroad Pioneer is about exploration and location of resources, supplying cities with goods by planning various train routes, "gaining control" of cities by beating opponents in trade wars, upgrading locomotives and resource production for higher efficiency. Pros: + Really interesting and unique atmosphere for a game. The story and narrator makes this somewhat feel like a history lesson; + Easy to learn. Despite the overwhelming amount of statistics/numbers in the game, it doesn't take long to learn how to beat the AI. Gameplay is also pretty chill, and can be played easily with only the mouse. Plan some routes and watch your trains go across the map; + One of my favorite features is the train upgrade system and ability to carry them over to the next mission. This way you can flex on the haters with your fleet of upgraded Six-Wheelers from freakin' 1831; + Surprisingly, there's multiplayer. Never got to try it, I'm not even sure if it works. Cons: - The main problem with Railroad Pioneer is the huge amount of obvious bugs/glitches, oversights and some potentially unfinished parts. Additionally, game saves tend to get corrupted in longer missions. I suggest completing each one in one sitting, and backup the "campaign.nfo" file after each one (to restore your train fleet). Other than that, I haven't encountered any crashes or other game-breaking bugs; - Very limited AI. The bot constantly slows itself down by blocking it's own trains with un-upgraded low-speed locomotives (c'mon dude, I'm basically doing you a favor for stealing your slow ass trains). Also, sometimes the AI just gives up and doesn't do anything for the rest of the mission; - No difficulty selection. Apart from the learning experience, there's not much of a challenge. Money is only an issue in the beginning. After that, you quickly reach millions and can freely spend it on everything you want: trains, railcars, troops, sabotage/bribery services, upgrades. The AI trying to act functional also makes it a whole lot easier; - Very limited soundtrack. RP's soundtrack consists of only 3 songs, each being 3 minutes long. They're nice songs, but that's an extremely low number for a game where missions last several hours. Worst part? Only one of the songs plays per mission.

Classic train management sim, very fun campaign that spans the story of the transcontinental railroad. The graphics have held up well over the years, the only caveat being that the wheels on the trains and cars don't spin. There is a multiplayer, and this too can be quite fun even this very day to play with friends; though you will likely need something like Logmein to use it. The game mechanics are fairly easy to manipulate once a player knows what to do to, but can be punishing for those that don't catch on; potentially even softlocking a campaign if poor decisions are made continuously. There is a bug that has never been patched in regards to the last mission of the campaign (it will crash randomly), but one can easily find a community created patch online. I wish more train management sims were like this, as the current ones available seem to be more bent on having a ridiculous number of mechanics to make themselves "interesting", rather than simple market mechanics and empire building. I've owned this game since it originally came out on disc in retail stores, and somehow it still has me coming back to it on the occasion years later.

It's an alright game. A bit basic take on TTD and one that feels sorta dated in comparison if only because of its 3d graphics. Overall it's worth 5 dollars or less, I got about that much out of the game; If you like games like TTD, go for it, but don't really expect anything much. If you're looking for an era based Railroad game or one with some depth, try Railroad tycoon 2 on here or download Open TTD.

I played this with windows 8 with no problems. Now, running windows 10 it glitches so bad you can't finish scenarios. Refuses to let you set up routes and more. If you run windows 10 I would not recommend it.

This game is like a cross between Railroad Tycoon 2 and Civilization. Initially most of the map is blacked out and you need to send out a troop of pioneers to explore the land (as in Civilization). The problem is that every time you find something you lose a member of your troop, find a resource - lose a prospector, find some wild animals - lose a trapper, etc. Every time you lose a member you have to go back and get another one to replace them which very quickly turns into a grind. It also takes ages to open up a map. There are other issues as well, tutorial is very short and only shows you the absolute basics (you will be looking at the manual a lot), I couldn't work out how many carriages i needed for a route (for instance in RT2 it would show that a station would supply 2 passenger carriages a year), once you've built a train (loco and carriages) and set a route you can't add further carriages or make changes on the fly, setting up signals and switches are not explained and require some trial and error, and lots of other niggling issues. Micromanagement is also a pain, you have to manually maintain your trains, not just your locos but also the carriages as well WTF. In truth, I feel that there is a lot of depth to this game but the game mechanics the devs used makes it all feel like a chore and a grind. On a positive note, the game ran smooth as silk on my Win10 toaster with integrated graphics with no crashes, I can only guess that the gamers having problems have a dedicated graphics card since old games like this are notoriously bad with dedicated graphic cards. Overall I can't recommended this game even at the sale price of 89 British pence, I played 2 hours, completed 2 missions, and received zero fun in return. :(

Let me begin by saying that this was a good game. I actually owned the disk version of this game back in 2003, and I am always the sucker for nostalgia. However, there are issues. Since I doubt any of these are going to ever be addressed, I wanted to list them for anyone thinking that they would like to try this game out. First, there is a memory leak problem. At around mission 6, the amount of locomotives and actions being taken by both you and the A.I. will make the game crash constantly. This problem is not always consistent as well, as I will occasionally get about 30 minutes into mission 6, and sometimes I only get about 30 seconds in. Believe it or not, this problem actually existed on my disk based version as well, (I still have it and tried it again before writing this), and even the rumored mods made by fans to try and fix the memory leak are themselves dated, inconsistent, and don't play well with the Steam version. This is probably the biggest gut blow, because the memory leak will make the game unplayable. You have been given notice. The other issues are much smaller. The first side-issue is that the game does not autosave which was not uncommon in 2003, but still pesky. If you do try and play in spite of the memory leak, only frequent manual saves will stop you from investing yourself in the game and then having to constantly do a hard start-over. The second-side issue (though maybe personal preference) is the lack of a game speed option. As trade wars become more severe, with sabotage's, track building, car and locomotive building, etc., you will get overwhelmed if you are not used to very fast paced tycoon games. I am not new to the genre. Yet, I still sometimes felt myself searching for any way to slow things down for a moment so I could plan essential remedial tasks that I could not que. I'll say again, that I really loved this game as a kid, and I still think it had the potential to be a very fun railroad tycoon game, with some really great and unique features (such as stealing the entire train of a competitor company), however, the memory leak is just too much to overcome. It is on this note, that I respectfully don't recommend the game.

It is not easy but it is fun. You'll start off maybe restarting your missions a couple of times to find the right paths, You have to hire Prospectors, Trappers and even gunslingers to clear the way ahead. Th engines are realistic, as is rate of travel and carryng capacity. You'll have to be careful to keep a reserve for repairs too. I played this game to death 10 years ago. They fixed the bugs I remember, it plays fine on WIN 7, and just plug your IPod or phone in to play music and turn off the soundtrack. It is worth every penny of $4. Enjoy.

[b]tl;dr version[/b]: if you like trains, steam, horn sounds and the spirit of exploration, don't hesitate to spend your 5 bucks on this and give it a try. Ooooh my, i used to spend hours and hours in this game back in the day, just meditating at all those toy trains doing their job from A to B, back and forth. For its price on steam now, i guess it's worth the money and you could give it a try. Yes, this game could've been deeper into the economics and route planning, the controls and menus could've been done better and there should've definitely been an order queue for multiple car and locomotive constructing, but eh, it's still a very cosy game to spend some of your time on. For: + pleasant graphics, music and atmosphere of the 19th century America, + a campaign mode where you cross the country coast to coast developing your network, + lots of locomotives and car types being gradually unlocked, + ability to upgrade trains, depots, city districts, manufacturing companies and what not as the trade volume grows + ability to rob and sabotage your opponents Against: - the menus and controls could've definitely been better - the limitation of train route length to 5 stations - certain technical problems (see below) IMPORTANT NOTICE: The optimization in this game kinda sucked a decade ago, making my PC lag when processing lots of trains in a widely developed railroad network by the middle of the campaign mode. I don't think this should be a problem with the modern PCs, but the code is kind of unstable as it is now: i myself cannot access savegame files as the application reacts with a crash to every attempt to load them. Be warned.