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.

I don't write reviews very often, and then they are normally positive. This, sadly, is a broken game. I loved the first game. I know this is early access, but come on guys: parallel tracks don't work properly, sometimes overlapping with strange results, and the signalling system is a ridiculous lottery that means sometimes an entire network stops and you have try to work what magic is needed to coax trains to move. It looks good. It's a good concept. But sheesh does it have a long way to go. I'll come back to it in a few months and see if the signals are fixed, because if they aren't dramatically overhauled this is a dodo.