Feral Interactive studio continues to port old and famous PC games on mobile platforms, this time it has gone to Sid Meier’s Railroads. We will have a look at this game.
The name Sid Meier is familiar to fans of strategy games. Seyed Mir is the creator of famous collections in the style of strategy and simulators, perhaps the Civilization collection can be mentioned at the top of them. However, this game maker, who founded the Firaxis Games studio with his two friends in 1996 and is still working there, has various other games, one of which is Sid Meier’s Railroads. A work of the Railroad Tycoon series, which is considered one of the oldest management games. The game Sid Meier’s Railroads was released in 2006 for PC and recently Feral Interactive Studio has ported it for mobile platforms. The code of this game has been sent to Zumji and this is an opportunity to have a look at it.
Feral Interactive has ported various games for mobile platforms in recent years, including Rome Total War and Company of Heroes. This studio had previously ported the game Sid Meier’s Railroads for Mac, and for this reason, it has a good knowledge of this work and was able to provide a suitable port of it on mobile platforms. But before addressing this issue, we must see what Sid Meier’s Railroads is and what style it has.
One of the most attractive childhood toys for many of our generation was the train! I don’t know how these types of toys are currently and what possible progress they have had, but for example, in the 70s, they were sold in different types, and you could make different tracks for the train with the parts related to the rails, and spend hours enjoying this fun and entertainment. became. Some of these trains even had a compartment in which special oil was poured, and when the train was moving, you could watch the smoke from burning this oil, which was a strange pleasure; Of course, this item had a really bad smell! Sid Meier’s Railroads is a digital, albeit much broader, example of this entertainment product where you can design an empire of trains and railroads in different environments and engage in the business side of it.
At the beginning of the game, players must choose one of the Barons who actually own this emerging railway empire. The game has different scenarios and you can choose from different regions of America to Britain and even some European countries and start construction there. The goal of the players in the game is very simple; You have to build your own railway track and try to do it in a way that ultimately gives you the most commercial profit. For this purpose, for example, with available resources, you can build a railway in a way that connects different cities and various mines are located on the way.
Depending on which scenario you have chosen and in which area you start your work, the type of sources through which you can achieve financial benefits are different; For example, in America, fuel and gold are among the main resources, and in European countries, food. Of course, trains are not limited to only types of cargo, and it is natural that when we are dealing with the railway track, it is also used as a means of human travel, and as a result, we also see passenger trains. In the same way, another use of the railway track can be the post and delivery of letters and other different consignments.
Playing Sid Meier’s Railroads is as fun as playing with childhood train toys and gives the audience a lot of freedom to build the tracks and do business the way they want.
But the most basic and interesting action in the game is the construction of the railway track. While this work is designed to be simple and convenient, it also has its own challenges. For example, you might have a route in mind to connect two cities and want to do it in a way that includes a mine on the railroad. However, to achieve this goal, it means that your railway has to pass through mountains or other obstacles, and as a result, you have to pay more money to build it, and this is where the question arises whether it is worth it or not. Whether the cost will be reimbursed in the future or not. Such challenges play a prominent role in the game, and over time and the expansion of your railway lines, they become more and more; Because, for example, sometimes you need to have several paths together and environmental restrictions may become a little problematic.
No matter which scenario you start in, Sid Meier’s Railroads includes progression and evolution over time. For example, over time, technologies can be used in the game that can be obtained through a kind of auction, and any company that wins this type of auction will have the monopoly of using that technology for a while. There are different types of trains and they include this progress; For example, eventually you will have faster trains that can speed up the transportation of anything. A total of 40 different types of trains are available in the game.
Perhaps all these descriptions evoke in the mind of the audience that we are dealing with a difficult and complicated game; However, in practice, this is not the case at all and even though the game presents enough challenges to the audience, we are not at all dealing with a difficult work full of management complications. The game is exactly like the train toy set and allows you to build the tracks in the way you like and then enjoy watching the trains move in them. Over time, these routes will get bigger and along with it, money will come to your company and you can make this empire more complete and bigger.
The port of the game on mobile platforms has been well done and improvements have been made in the user interface and other aspects so that the readability of details and the use of touch controls to apply commands are appropriate and comfortable.
But how does a work in this style and context, whose original version is designed for experience with a mouse and keyboard, respond on the smaller screen of tablets and especially mobile phones? Well, this is where Feral Interactive Studio has done its job almost perfectly. Sid Meier’s Railroads has been greatly improved on the mobile platform and looks even better visually than the PC version. The first action of the creators was changes in the design of the user interface of the game; As in the PC version, many of the items are text-based, and since these writings might not be readable on mobile phones, Feral Interactive has replaced them with functional visual symbols. The next positive action is related to the process of building railway lines, and Feral Interactive managed to implement this well in the form of touch controls, and although sometimes we see errors in this system, but overall, everything is in a way that is easy to use. You can choose the lines and make the track as you like.
One of the differences between the mobile version of the game and the original PC version is the removal of multiplayer aspects. In the PC version, there was the ability for players to experience the game together in a competitive mode, and this made the competition enter the game and give it more excitement, apart from the pleasure of construction and earning money. This feature has been removed in mobile versions, but Faral Interactive has added new and exclusive changes to the game scenarios to compensate for it, and has considered missions that can fill the void of the multiplayer mode, which is the right decision to some extent. have been; Because due to the dimensional limitations of mobile platforms, it would be really hard to experience a game as vast as Sid Meier’s Railroads in a competitive way on them.
Overall, Sid Meier’s Railroads is one of Sid Meier’s games that may be unknown to many, but if you are a fan of management style, you are definitely recommended to experience it. The mobile port of the game is generally well done and even though we are dealing with an old work, the game looks good visually on these new platforms and is well optimized for touch controls. So if you like the management style, Sid Meier’s Railroads can keep you engaged and entertained for quite some time.
