Railway Empire – Nintendo Switch Edition

Genre: Management Sim

Players: 1

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Review:

Railway Empire is a Management Sim released on multiple platforms in 2018 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game has players working to expand railways during the 1800s, choosing where to place stations, setting routes to supply cities with goods, and managing their locomotives.

The presentation here is a mixed bag. On the one hand, this game does a great job letting you scale from up above the cities and rail lines, right down into the thick of things without any slowdown I noticed, with some nice details in the landscapes, cities, and trains themselves. On the other hand, there’s some noticeable pop-up, and the game’s soundtrack is all over the place, with some music that seems setting-appropriate, and some that just seems randomly tossed in. In addition, while it’s nice that there’s voice over for tutorial and campaign content, that voice over comes with a strong European accent that seems very out of place for the base game’s American setting.

If the muddled presentation wasn’t enough already, things seem to have taken a turn for the worse in the port to the Nintendo Switch. Not only does this version of the game not make use of features like the touchscreen, but this game clearly wasn’t designed with a portable platform in mind – the text on-screen is often so tiny it’s hard to make out on a TV screen, let alone in portable mode. Ultimately, while the game works on Nintendo Switch, it clearly wasn’t designed to play on the platform.

All of that brings me to the gameplay itself. This game does hold a lot of promise for players to not only design their own dream railroad route, but to manage their rail empire. However, that promise is largely broken with a clunky and often indecipherable interface. Doing something as simple as placing rail or setting up a locomotive on a route is made excruciating by the game often not wanting to do as you command it to for some reason. Repeatedly I found myself trying to do one of these simple tasks and struggling, unsure just why the game was preventing me from proceeding. Was I in the wrong menu? I’d run through all the menus that seemed relevant. Was I using the wrong button? The buttons being displayed didn’t list any corresponding to what I needed… so much of my time in this game was spent flailing away at the damn interface to try to complete basic tasks, to the point where that became a bigger challenge than any tasks the game intentionally threw at me.

Perhaps if you can get past the muddled presentation, the su-standard port, and the horrendous interface problems, Railway Empire may have a lot of fun for railroad enthusiasts. However, for me it was torturously frustrating. If you’re looking for a good Management Sim on the Nintendo Switch, look elsewhere.

tl;dr – Railway Empire is a Management Sim that has you creating your own railroad routes and managing your rail empire. It’s a game that holds a lot of potential, but that potential is ruined by a disastrously frustrating interface and a sub-par presentation built around an experience that clearly wasn’t made with the Nintendo Switch in mind. Don’t ride this train.

Grade: D+

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