It’s embarrassing HOW many hours I spent playing Railroad Tycoon, SimCity, A-Train, and Locomotion in my formative years. RAILGRADE is the penultimate evolution of those precursors with great storytelling. And IF you love trains and logistics, it’s the perfect title because it comes without all the complexity of some of those earlier titles. I think ALL were ambitious in their own right, but sometimes those ambitions outstripped the processors available at the time. What I really love about RAILGRADE is they’ve ditched the clunky consist management. The user face is intuitive while the onboarding tutorials are engaging. The supply-chains are equally intuitive and not unnecessarily complicated (or before you’ve played scenarios to build the requisite skills to solve correctly). The emerging theme here is simplicity and it’s likely by design― the creators focusing on problem solving versus a classic business simulator. I also love the latter, but sometimes don’t want the tediousness of managing my share price, engaging in fare wars with my competitors, and selling/buying stocks. IF you get lost anywhere in RAILGRADE it’s the hours you’ll spend following your trains in the rail view.

Related
A-Train: All Aboard! Tourism (YouTube)