The original Railroad Corporation was quite fun, but it had a lot of odd, quirky, annoying things that were frustrating to work around.

Not only has this sequel eliminated *ALL* of the annoying stuff; the quality of life improvements are significant, and the gameplay has gotten more nuanced and interesting. Absolute win by the developers, this is the best railroad management/tycoon style game I've seen in years.

I recognize the game is in early access so I won't comment to bugs or things that are not fleshed out.

I find myself wanting to come back to the game - it's got the good stuff in it.

But, there are so many clicks that aren't rewarding. Each click, as much as possible, should be a choice by the player. In this game too many clicks are me fixing obvious things when I want to make ANY change to my railroad.

1) My trains can pull more. I have to add more cars, but then I also have to adjust every car that gets unloaded and I have to find every train to do that on that's running this line. And given how long lines are, that could be 5 trains. So if I get a new locomotive that can pull further, to take advantage of said research, I have to do about 10 clicks per train and if I have 5 trains between cities and 10 cities...how is that fun?

2) The research. Just feels like a minigame of hand speed because there's no real constraint other than "are you patient enough to click through all the buttons while it interrupts your game"

3) The bankruptcy mechanic is.....not what I would have gone for.

4) It is so hard to actually ship stuff between many cities, that it's way easier to just buy factories where you already have raw goods and ship everything to one city

5) Laying track next to existing track doesn't 'click' rewardingly. You're having to work around the poor clicking even when you use the lock button (shift i think? mb ctrl?)

6) The semaphore game is....not fun. you just have to put them everywhere otherwise trains dont intelligently share tracks. And then god forbid you need to add another pair of rails and rejigger all the crossings. I see that there is a commnity that like the semaphore gaming....But idk, I want to build! Not diagnose where a semaphore needs to be made into a one way in the other direction or else 20 trains get stuck.

Game is not ready yet. Yes, its early access, but the game should be playable and enjoyable in early access. I was having fun at the start but that got old very quick when my trains started breaking down and after all the pop up notifications of train malfunctions. I only had 5 or 6 trains, imagine what all those annoying notifications are like after you expand your railroad with lots more trains and cities. In an attempt to counter the train break down problems, I researched everything for that train, with really no improvements. The game also tells you with each breakdown or malfunction to place a Repair Shop in the station. Every station I own now has a Repair Shop. This repair function of the game really needs work badly. They really need a tutorial for it too. In addition, research to improve the trains is way out of balance. I found that the next 2 trains that you can research are really useless, cause they have no load pull value. They may be a little better in other aspects like speed but without the load capacity. Even after the research improvements the other trains are still not worth the investment. The train worth buying is blocked by whatever global technology advancement in research is. Not figured that out yet. Another real annoying aspect of the game is the quarterly tax window pop ups. Its a large window that comes up in the middle of the screen and you must acknowledge it to close. If you have the train window open and expanded you have to close it to access and close the tax window. The game progress moves way too fast and I think the devs catered that to the much younger crowd. I had about 8 cities connected with double track. I did get caught off guard and went bankrupt twice, ends the game. You buy the commodities at one city and transport them to another to sell. So you must keep a working balance to accommodate that aspect of the game, which I have no problem with. A nice touch I think. What I didn't care for were the early corporate bail outs with an infusion of money, 3 total I think. Anyways, the main reason for the negative review is the train repair/maintenance aspect, it's way over exaggerated. That's the main reason I can't play this game anymore. The Devs did a great job on track laying and signals you can place. The part of the game I did enjoy.