Railroad Corporation 2

Railroad Corporation 2 was provided by Iceberg Interactive for review. Thank you!

Railroad Corporation 2 was in Early Access at the time of this review, so content and performance is subject to change.

The transport logistics genre has been going strong for over 30 years now, and I've been a huge fan of it ever since playing Transport Tycoon as a kid on my Windows 95 PC. I'm glad to say that while Railroad Corporation 2 isn't quite as large in scope as something like Transport Tycoon, but it still handles itself well.

The basic premise here is simple: build a functioning (and profitable) railroad network that ferries vital goods between towns and cities to expand further and thus open up further transport routes so you can earn even more money. It's all very capitalist and a perfect setting for a business management game.

Railroad Corporation 2 has a campaign mode with objectives spread across four chapters (or missions). They're all pretty similar, just with a different map and set of objectives to accomplish. You also have the option to play in the sandbox mode, where you build a profitable network without objectives.

Here is where the Early Access nature of the game stands out. There are no adjustable settings for either mode. The campaign will have difficulty options in the full release; however, "Normal" is the only option. Sandbox mode is also set to allow AI opponents and adjustable map sizes and biomes. Right now, there are no AI opponents in the game, the map size is fixed to be "Medium" with about 20-25 towns on the map, and the only biome is snowy.

Thankfully, once you're in the game, there's a decent amount to keep you busy. There's a good variety of resources and production chains for you to get your head around, requiring the creation of reasonably complex and well-thought-out railroad networks. Whiskey Distilleries, for example, need both glass and grain shipped to them before they can output whiskey, which larger cities desire. So you'll need to build a station next to the distillery, find nearby industries that produce grain and glass, create a train route to supply the distillery, and then a further train to take the whiskey produced to a city.

There are plenty of other resources, including logs, planks, paper, flour, bread, quartz, and more. It'll take you a while to familiarize yourself with all the resources and the production chains they're used in, but for the most part, the resources are used to produce more valuable resources, which are then shipped to cities, which allow them to grow. Bigger cities have more plots of land available to buy, and when you buy a plot of land, you can build further industries on that land to open up more potential trade routes or expand the city itself to make it more profitable.

Railroad Corporation 2 also has an interesting mechanic where your trains must purchase the commodities they pick up before transporting them and selling them for profit. Still, if you don't have enough money to purchase the cargo, the train will simply "pause" at its position, even when the money becomes available, which is terribly obnoxious. The game could do with an option to resume the route when money becomes available automatically.

The game's construction element is pretty basic, but it gets the job done. You can build stations beside towns and industries within their "catchment area" to pick up and drop off goods. These stations can be upgraded with facilities that allow you to buy trains, repair trains, refuel faster, etc.

Railroads are constructed using a spline system, where you can just place nodes, and it'll build your railroad along the path following the nodes. Construction of bridges and tunnels happens automatically when the situation calls for it, but constructing them dramatically increases the cost of the railroad. Seeing your sprawling network grow across the map is basic but also satisfying.

You can also place signals that allow you to manage trains more effectively if multiple trains run on one railroad. I'm not hugely into managing logistics that complex, so my extent of this was mainly managing "crossroads" when rails intersected, as there's no way of bridging over or tunneling under existing railroads. Sometimes, I had more than one railroad join up as they arrived at a station, as stations can only have a maximum of four railroad lines.

In terms of progression, if you aren't playing through the objectives and chapters of the campaign, your progression will mostly come from research. You can hire scientists at your office and assign them to research projects that will unlock new trains and upgrade existing ones.

As for the presentation, the game looks fine. It won't win any awards, but it's decent, and you can zoom very far in to see the trains at a good level of detail. Sounds mostly consist of hearing your trains "panting," at least when dealing with steam trains, and the music track is sort of your generic American Country Rock type of affair, with plenty of guitars in use at the very least.

The game does have an online multiplayer mode, which I wasn't able to test, as there were no games running whenever I checked. So, if you want to play this game with opponents, you'll probably want to organize purchasing the game with friends to try it out.

Where Railroad Corporation 2 is currently lacking, however, is in its quality of life features. There are just some things missing that I would consider as requirements for a game of this genre. For example, there's no way to auto-replace trains when they reach the end of their service life. That means you must constantly check your trains to see if they need to be replaced, as their maximum reliability is always falling as they age.

Another thing that's missing is the yearly profit logs for each train. You get a profit/loss log for each train, but it's over the train's lifetime, not yearly, which means you cannot know if a train has recently become unprofitable. You could be running a train at a loss for years if it had been profitable for a few years prior and have no way of knowing. It's small, but you need access to information like this when you're running a business.

At the end of the day, Railroad Corporation 2 is a pretty solid title. The base mechanics are good, but content-wise, it might be a little lacking right now. With only four missions (although they are fairly lengthy), no AI, and only a snow biome to play in, and with the difficulty being on the easier side, it's hard to lose money.

With the abovementioned issues, I'd recommend you wait a while before diving in unless you've been looking forward to this one. If you are interested in transport management games, put Railroad Corporation 2 on your wishlist, as a few months down the line, this could be one of the best in the genre.

Railroad Corporation 2 - Steam Deck Performance

Railroad Corporation 2 sadly doesn't support 16:10 resolutions, so you'll have black bars at the top and bottom of your screen. The closest resolution we can play at is 1280x720. The game also has no controller support, so you'll need to make a controller layout, or you can use a controller layout I made called "SteamDeckHQ.com Recommended" in the community layouts.

Text is somewhat hard to read in the game, especially regarding commodities on the map. As they aren't rendered as UI elements, they'll get smaller and larger as you zoom in and out. Fortunately, this does mean you can zoom in to read them.

Recommended Settings - 45 FPS

We're setting the SteamOS frame rate limit to 60, and we'll have no TDP Limit here.

In the in-game settings, I selected the "Low" preset and then set the in-game FPS limiter to 45, as using the SteamOS limiter introduces input lag. You can see the settings I used in the image below.

At these settings, the game runs at 45 FPS sometimes, although when scrolling the map, FPS often drops to the low 40s or high 30s. Also, when you build a railroad, the FPS drops depending on how long the railroad you're building is, to the teens if it's very long. Fortunately, as this is a slow-paced, non-reactionary strategy game, the mild drops to around 40 FPS are barely noticeable, and the game remains pleasant to play, except for the drop when building railroads, which can't be avoided.

The power draw generally stays on the lower side, with the game using around 13W-15W for most of the time.

Temperatures also don't get too high, holding around the 65C-70C range for me, there is some fan noise, but it doesn't ramp up and get irritating.

Accessibility:

Railroad Corporation 2 doesn't have any accessibility options right now. This includes no UI Scaling, which is a shame because the game has some hard-to-read text.

Conclusion:

Railroad Corporation 2 is a pretty solid start for an early-access title. There are some rough edges, such as the lack of accessibility options, especially UI Scaling where the Steam Deck is concerned, and just options in general for the game. There are also a number of quality-of-life features that really need to be added soon, such as auto-replacement of trains when they reach the end of their service life and more financial information per train.

For now, I would say put this one on your wishlist and let the developers flesh out their ideas, introduce some AI opponents to make the game more challenging, get a biome other than snow, and add some quality-of-life features. The developer roadmap states that a grass biome will be coming in Q2 2025, but it'll be a long wait until Q4 2025 for any AI opponents, which is a shame. You can always play with up to 4 players in online multiplayer, but you'll likely need friends, as the game was dead online when I checked.

Railroad Corporation 2 runs OK on the Steam Deck. Performance is perfectly acceptable for the kind of game this is, and the controls, while not ideal, do work fine. I would love for additional hotkeys added so we can map them to a controller layout though, as the game is severely lacking hotkeys right now, even on the keyboard. From what I can tell, speeding up the simulation time isn't mapped to a hotkey, nor are any of the menus, meaning we need to use the touchpad as a mouse to navigate all menus.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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