You won’t need a ticket for this ride
$12.99 FROM www.feralinteractive.com
NEEDS Needs iPhone 6S (2015, A9 chip) or later, iPad 5th generation (2017) or later, iPad Air 3rd generation or later, iPad mini 5th generation or later, any iPad Pro; iOS 15.5 or later
From 2006 comes an iPadOS port of yet another classic PC game, this time a railroad tycoon sim in which you plot steam–based financial dominance with not a care for the huge amounts of industrial pollution you’re inflicting on the world.
While it’s possible to play your way through various careers and scenarios, a better fit for mobile is the Train Table mode, in which you’re set loose on the landscape with no goals, infinite cash, and you may find yourself reaching for an engine driver’s cap.
The actual game, in which you play against up to 20 would–be railroad barons, isn’t exactly stressful. The process of linking resources such as farms with cities and trying to do so as efficiently as possible is an optimization problem which, mixed with lovely countryside and the gentle chuff of the locomotive, can actually be relaxing. You’ll still swear — often at yourself for failing to foresee the precise situation you find yourself in, trying to splice new tracks on to an existing network that doesn’t go in quite the right direction — but the constant increases in your wealth thanks to trains shuttling back and forth between locations makes up for it. Once you’ve got your rail backbone laid out — less like a spine and more like the webs produced by spiders who’ve been given LSD — the map comes to life, and you’re able to put down branch lines to connect nodes you’d overlooked in the first pass, as well as improving cities by building new industries in them. There’s the ability to buy and sell stocks too, hoping to keep your opponents down by denying them the ability to make a quick buck, or giving your own finances a sudden boost if things are looking tight.
Maps include parts of Europe and the US, and there are 16 scenarios to pit your planning abilities against. None of them are especially challenging, though it’s possible to up the difficulty by introducing rules, like only one train being allowed in any given spot, that increases the realism too. Working through them becomes a matter of time, rather than attempting to work out a crossword clue with your mind. The interface has been greatly changed in the port, the new touch-friendly way of doing things streamlining the process of laying track and finding out the info you need that was so easy with a mouse.
Time moves on and so does the
