Head for the hills, the station is on fire.
As Nintendo World Report’s resident train rep, I was thrilled when I heard that Railway Empire 2 was announced and coming to Switch. Despite being released several years after the PC version, playing the original on Switch was a great experience, and one that thwarted my recurring railroad tycoon annoyances. And now that it’s portable, it’s even better. So when it finally came out, I definitely jumped to review it.
Sadly, the Switch port of Railway Empire 2 is buggy and basically unplayable. I’ve been delaying writing a review hoping for an update to get the game working properly, but as of this writing there is still no update. The big problem is that the game randomly crashes the system and requires a hard reset. This problem happened to him twice on the tutorial level alone, prompting me to try starting the campaign and crashing on the first level about 20 minutes later. Another small problem with the tutorial is that at certain times, certain elements can be placed in certain places, but depending on how the track was previously placed, it may not be possible to place them. This shouldn’t be a problem, but at this point in the tutorial, you can’t go back out of the menu and modify the track placement (which you can do in the regular game), and you’ll have to redo the tutorial level.
The graphics are so bad that, barring some early bugs, this Switch port seems decades behind. I went back to the original game (running on the exact same Switch) to make sure I wasn’t fooled. The original game’s graphics aren’t stunning, but they’re light-years better than those of Nintendo’s Railway Empire 2. hybrid.
The game does have some bright spots, but the aforementioned glitches and crashes prevented us from delving into them too much. Track construction was improved with less detailed management, and improvements such as station grids were added. A station grid is a track element that includes a series of switches and signal bridges across parallel tracks that automatically guide trains to vacant locations in the station. This eliminates the need to manually lay out all the track switches and can be dropped as a single element in front of the station. The game also facilitates train signals and instructions by automatically placing traffic lights on parallel tracks. This should make it easier to focus on the more economical parts of the game, but honestly I didn’t play enough to see if my theory was correct.
Overall, unless an update is released that fixes the glitch, I’m either buying the game on another platform or going back to playing the original Railway Empire on Switch. With graphics as it is, it’s probably not worth the frustration to make it work. It’s a shame to see them focus on improving the track routing system, but it doesn’t seem to focus on switch ports.
