In Railroads, your objective is to establish a railroad empire, transporting goods on your trains on your tracks between cities and isolated resources. You meet supply and demand, can buy out businesses and set up industries, and ultimately out buy the stocks of all you rivals and amass income to the point where your wealth forms a significant portion of the worlds, in the tradition of history's greatest tycoons.

Combine these lofty objectives with relatively simple yet versatile gameplay mechanics and we found that the game was very addictive, capable of easily eating up entire days. So, with all the potential to become a murky, micromanagement nightmare, how exactly did Firaxis manage to produce railroad crack? We’ll explain…

First and most important, as mentioned the gameplay is impressively easy to both pick up and use. In a game all about placing down railroad track how exactly you do this is of utmost importance.

The game uses a system works remarkably well: you select where you want the track to start, then as you move your mouse a dynamic ribbon of track attaches your cursor to the place where the track started. Up to the point where you finalise the placement the ribbon of track is constantly trying to find the best and smoothest path between the start and end positions (as steep turns or rises can affect train traffic). It all feels very intuitive, and allows you to spend hours at a time placing down elaborate networks without your brains leaking out of your ears.

Each city has goods it produces and goods it demands, such as passengers, mail, gold, wine, luxuries, etc.. Setting up a train route is very easy: you simply buy a train, and then set up the points on the map of your tracks that the train will visit, before finally setting up what carriages it loads and unloads at each stop. In all the time we played the game, after the initial tutorial there was never a gameplay problem we couldn’t figure out or which didn’t come naturally. This is a good example of insightful interface design, something for which, of course, Firaxis is already well known.

Unlike the Tycoon games and other such titles which have a chained campaign, this game puts you in the position to choose from a number of dependant scenarios, each with its own back story and objectives, set in a period and part of the world that is historically significant for its railroads. Examples include Western Europe during Napoleon's reign, where his railroads helped industrialise and power his mighty empire. Another example is the United States during the gold rush, where gold and oil meant that a railroad network spanning such cities as San Francisco and Las Vegas ensured the vast growth in wealth of the burgeoning Nation.

While this caused a small feeling of disjointedness and pointlessness, because once you beat a scenario you had to start all over again in the next mission as if your achievements were for nothing, it did provide a stronger sense of success we felt as each mission was won on its own merits, and not because of any carrying over of a previous game's powerbase. The richness of the historical background and how that was reflected in map design and the cities/resources also provided a comfortable ambience.

Graphically the game is very pretty. The cities and resources dotted around the map, as well as the map itself, are very Civ 4 in that exaggeration and bright colours are the norm. Nevertheless the rendering engine is very sparkly and everything looks fairly polished while still being very economical in terms of system resources.

But for any train junky what is truly important is how the trains themselves look and appear, and here at least there are no compromises. Each train is beautifully rendered and from the cross comparisons we made against Internet images each is almost identical to its real life counterpart.

As a result these trains almost look out of place against the rest of the cartooneyness, adding an air of exactness and engineering beauty against the simpler backdrop. Later in the game when your network has expanded to cover a good deal of whatever scenario you are playing, and you have dozens of trains constantly in movement about the map, the slowdown can become noticeable unfortunately. It is understandable given the constantly moving trains with each bellowing out smoke, which can really intermingle at a city where half a dozen trains are trying to load and unload simultaneously, and the fact that every object from cities to corn fields has its own set of exquisite animations. Of course, with the right computer, this is no more than an inconvenience.

So what’s the bottom line? A great game. It is addictive and challenging, with a diverse range of gameplay scenarios to work your way through. The sandbox and unwinnable nature of the game is similar to other games in this genre, so whether you like that or not is a matter of personal preference.

Everything feels very polished from the gameplay to the scenarios to the graphical interface, so this is a true connoisseur’s title. A global or at least a national campaign mode would have been nice, for those of us who wish for a more diverse empire building experience, but it’s not a great omission as some of the scenarios given are truly massive in size. All in all an excellent megalomaniac’s game.