Railway Empire 2

18 hours is enough to render a verdict: Thumbs Up! This is a beautiful, fun game.

Game has that extra level of the great ones, complexity all the way down. Once you know the mechanics (which are great on their own), there's that extra further layer of true competition with opposing companies. Get to know the mechanics, they do make sense, figure out grand strategies, and you'll say goodbye to everyone for months.

Great game, excellent railway simulation game. If you enjoy Railway Empire 1 or Railway Tycoon, this is the game for you!

Nice game... terrible A.I. Train will sit and and wait for a train that over a hundred miles away, just so it can cross it's path... not us e the same rail line... just passes over the rail line to go to a whole other track...

Some - not many - improvements over Railway Empire 1. I like the additions, but as some others have noted, why can trains not figure out how to bypass each other. You can have intelligent stations with up to 8 rails, trains will go around each other only at these points. Anywhere else on the track you will find they backup waiting on the first train in line to fill up etc.. Even when you have a network of paired, directional tracks you will get traffic issues as the game drags on. After learning to live with these limitations, I enjoyed the game a lot. I have my usual gripes about the large number of map packs keeping me from grinding out all the achievements without spending another 70$ or so - pretty normal for transport games I guess. Would recommend, just know all game sessions have an expiration date as traffic piles up with no real way to solve the issue other than creating spaghetti tracks all over to make "shorter" bypass routes for trains.

If you like sim games and city builder this is a game to try. I downloaded it for my son only to find out that is might be a little out of his understanding as he is just new to gaming, but found out that i really enjoyed it and would recommend it to others.

I find this game to be quiet confusing with some of its mechanics how ever i am slowly getting to grips with it by watching you tube . I think the graphics are great and the realistic feel of the years to date are great to.

The detail both graphical and game mechanics is very good. If you like to really immerse yourself into detail this is a good game.

It's a fantastic logistics game. Some of the time restrictions can be punishing but once you start to understand how to optimize / what to prioritize, it becomes a lot easier!

I purchased this game and all available DLC because I love Railroad Tycoon style games. The game is not perfect by any means, but I've spent nearly 300 hours playing and had a great time. Unfortunately, and the reason I'm giving this game a thumbs down, the most recent hot fix released on March 27th completely broke the game's graphics. All passenger and cargo cars on your trains have completely disappeared. All you'll see is just an engine putting around. The game still fundamentally "works" as it registers picking up and dropping off cargo like normal, but without seeing things in action, it completely takes you out of the game. I've tried everything I can think of to fix the issue... new games, new saves, doing a completely clean reinstall of the game, but nothing fixes it. It's something in the coding, since people all over the world are having this problem.

I've spent nearly $100 for everything on this game, and releasing a patch like this that completely breaks the game is unacceptable. If this doesn't get fixed, I'll be requesting a refund. If the game is fixed, I would recommend the game as I've had hours of fun playing, but until this glitch is resolved, I'd say avoid this game at all costs.

It's a train sim with no wagons!

Latest patch cause the wagons to be invisible. No fix yet for a month.

Easier track layout than the original, but game play is not that different. Mostly quality of life improvements.

I've enjoyed the game. Would buy the the dlc's if they were $5.99 each.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

i like it

Слишком упрощенные механики. Не зашло

Great game

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.

I love this game even more when i understand more about the mechanics behind everything such as how to calculate the number of trains to meet your cities demands so you wont waste your money on trains. And such as how you handle the platforms between cities and your rural business to prevent train congestion.

I bougth this game at a discounted price which is worth it. I expect more discount on their DLC bc i cant wait to purchase them. Hope you enjoy this as I do. Happy gaming!

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.

Set a timer alarm.
Walk away.
Or you will never get anything else done.
So Addictive.

All Aboard for the whole new World!

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.

So far I think its a clear improvement on the first game. On the surface the games play very similarly, but everything is much more refined here in RE2. The pacing and economy balance are my personal favorite improvements. QoL features and trimming down of unnecessary tedium from RE1. The maps are also huge which is pretty cool.

My only complaint so far would be that the performance is not the best. My frame rate suffers a bit when zooming in.

For a railway game it is pretty good. I have played both versions,

This game is not very good. The sandbox is hot garbage.

Good Strategy game with resonable graphics

The tracklaying is not as good as Railway Empire 1. It's much harder to get the nice broad sweeping curves that I used to get. I would have been much happier if they had just upgraded the graphics and fixed the bugs (station throat crossover bugs especially) in RE1 and added the new features (eight tracked stations).

Just relax and enjoy building some roads my man!

It may be odd but I love just planning and expanding my network

Honestly, i hated the game at first, it was too different from No.1 which i loved. Took me about 6 months to actually really enjoy it, now i love it, although i only have 2 scenarios left so really need either more maps or No. 3 lol.

I Just Love it!

I thought it might be a good idea to first stress test the game with a complex network of trains and rails. Turns out it was a good idea. The game has so much potential, yet progression feels pointless after the first hour ingame, which is just sad.
In terms of network logics it does a quite good job within the automatic signals mode, but still its just surface scratching and it is not really possible to tweak rail networks to a maximum efficiency, as trains are literally as stupid as they could possibly be. The manual signals mode is a horrible mess, I would not recommend messing around with this. (And yes there are many good examples, of how network signals could work out there. e.g. Sweet Transit, or Factorio)

On top of all that. It is literally unplayable in Multiplayer, since once you want to use waypoints to create better working routes they all recieve the same name like 1. waypoint 0; 2. Waypoint 0 and so on and so forth...
But that is not everything. As this is possibly just and optical flaw Trains start driving in endless circles across all map hunting for a waypoint they will never reach, resulting in hitting 0% HP creating unsolveable traffic jams. I spent literally hours following these trains to figure out they pass the shown waypoint multiple times without getting further.
It is just frustrating and for that price I wont ever buy something like that again.

Fantastic Train & economy game, really enjoy building a railroad empire, i would like to see some more interesting game modes brought in to make the game more complex like taking over a failing empire and having to put it to rights or further increasing the difficulty from even more reduced starting money etc to increase the grind needed but I would recommend this game to any gamer out there that enjoys building from nothing. a really good modern take on the railroad tycoon games i used to play as a kid.

Kinda boring game, Feels a bit clunky. More strategy required than most other similar games, but not much flexibility if you put your stations in the wrong spots. Would wait for a sale if you are interested in this. I'm not going to play any more.

Awkwardly difficult tasks completely end your play-through without notice.
Very janky, graphics very un-ideal for a game this new.

Overpriced.

I LIKE TRAINS

Enjoyed the campaign and scenarios after figuring out the new warehouse scheme. Still some scale problems and AI not great.

Super fun logistics building game. mechanics are pretty easy to pickup from tutorial. there are a few things that could be refined in the game, i.e. better interface on seeing goods distribution and a more even scaling of needed goods in cities to grow. I'd also like to see more micro maps in the USA (maybe Im biased), but like a focus on smaller areas/towns in some railroad hotbeds would be great. Also could do with a better time progression/more meaningful tech advances. Getting new engines doesn't seem as impactful as it could be, and the scaling of cash earned/growing your railroad gets super easy. the object becomes more about logistics rather than railroad competition so to speak. It'd be cool if it made sense to play from 1840-1970. Anyhow, I still love the game, just a few things that could be tweaked/make it a little more interesting.

yep

GET BUMBER 1 IS NUCH BETTER

At the moment this game is fundamentally broken.

Click on a city station - it says there are in excess of 500 passengers and 500 pieces of mail waiting to be picked up - an express train arrives and 0 passengers or mail is loaded onto the train, despite that train going to all possible destinations.

Click on a resource, it says it produces over 16 trucks worth a week, yet the train is waiting in excess of 4 weeks to load 4 trucks.

I guess American math is different from the maths everywhere else in the World.

Also, the vast majority of trains are American, even on the UK or European maps - which is largely why I haven't bothered to buy the India DLC....American trains don't run in the UK, Europe or India in the time period this game is set in, but I guess to Americans everyone uses their stuff, when in reality they never have, never wanted to and probably never will do.

Many comments compare this to RR Tycoon....and I think they really need to see a shrink coz this is not even close to RR Tycoon - at least Sid knew that different areas of the world had their own trains and raw materials, and the production values quoted were exactly what was produced. He also allowed the player to select what cargo trains hauled from one station to the next, rather than letting the game choose what, if anything, will be hauled.

There are also issues running multiple trains on a loop of track, the signalling just doesn't work (despite a patch released in the last day or two) and it takes multiple quit/load for the game to allow multiple trains to run on the loop.

Most of the achievements are also broken, it just doesn't register when you have fulfilled the criteria for most of them.

If your a lover of RR Tycoon you are going to be frustrated and enraged by what happens in this game, and sit there begging Sid to write a new one so we don't have to put up with the appalling wannabes.

track is impossible to lay without creating tunnels and bridges. It also has this hard on for making the track not strait the moment you add another point on the track to change the elevation.
Id rather just go back and play RE 1 and not bother at all with this crap version!!

As I continue to grapple with my midlife crisis, I hopped into yet another train game - Railway Empire 2. If Transport Fever is a modernization of TTD, Railway Empire is the modernization of Sid Meier's Railroads!, which itself was a modernization of the better Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon series. The problem with Sid Meier's Railroads! is that it simplified a lot of the minutia that originally made Railroad Tycoon so addictive. It was a good enough game but inferior to its predecessor, Railroad Tycoon 3.

And so it is with Railway Empire 2. I remember liking the first version of the game. The track-laying mechanic is probably the best of any railway tycoon (genre) game I've played. Rather than laying tracks by segment, you're allowed to plan the entire line before committing to it, tweaking the path it takes along its length and seeing how it affects cost, speed, grade, whatever.

I eventually lost interest in the first Railway Empire after 20-30 hours but was satisfied I got my money's worth. It's been long enough that I'm not sure exactly what I liked about the first one, but Railway Empire 2 seems to be missing it. It's got that same Kalypso-style personality that I absolutely love but creating routes is now an exercise in frustration. Either it was oversimplified from the first one or the first one's scenarios didn't require very complicated routing. At any rate, the game doesn't give you the control or information you need to plan multiple interconnecting lines, especially if you make the mistake of choosing the "auto-signal" option at the outset of the campaign. But at the same time, it only seems to auto-signal parallel lines. Imagine you're driving on the interstate but every time a car hops on the on-ramp, everyone else on the interstate has to stop and wait for them to merge. Also the on-ramp is several miles long.

Conversely, the game has you manually placing certain structures and gridirons that I would consider inconsequential in a setting where even the layout of the cities is procedurally rearranged to make room for your railway as it plows through the center of town.

It's a weird mish-mash of oversimplified and overcomplicated that doesn't seem to work. Laying tracks and planning lines is reminiscent of the simple joy of playing with model trains. But then having to manage utilization of those tracks, along with individual engine maintenance, upgrades, supply and demand, stocks and bonds, and research is much more akin to a deeper management game. Unfortunately, the game doesn't surface the information or authority you need to manage these things effectively. The end result is a tangled mess of rails and confusion over how your once-beautiful railway came to this. Play Transport Fever 2 instead.