Railway Empire 2 Review – Review

As the resident train guy at Nintendo World Report, I was very excited when I heard that Railway Empire 2 was announced and coming to the Switch. Playing the original on the Switch, though it was released years after the PC version, was a great experience and scratched the recurring Railroad Tycoon itch. And now it was portable, which was even better! So when it finally came out, I made sure to jump on reviewing it.

Sadly the port of Railway Empire 2 to Switch is so buggy, it is basically unplayable. I was delaying writing the review in hopes of an update to make the game work correctly, but as of this writing, I haven’t seen an update. The big issue is that the game randomly crashes the system, requiring a hard reset. It happened twice during just the tutorial levels, which then pushed me to just try starting the campaign, and that then crashed in the first level after about 20 minutes in. Another, smaller issue with the tutorial is that at certain times, it would require you to place certain elements in a specific spot, but depending on how you laid your track previously, it would not allow you to lay that element. This wouldn’t be a problem, but the tutorial at this point doesn’t let you back out of that menu to fix the track’s placement, (which you could do in the normal game), requiring you to restart the tutorial level.

Aside from the initial bugs, the graphics are horrendous, in a way that makes this Switch port seem decades behind. I went back to the original game (running on the same exact Switch) just to make sure I wasn’t fooling myself, and while the graphics in the original game aren’t amazing, they are lightyears better than Railway Empire 2’s graphics on Nintendo’s hybrid.

The game has some bright spots, though I didn’t get to explore it too much because of the aforementioned glitches and crashes. The trackbuilding has been reworked to require less micromanaging, with improvements such as the station gridiron, which is a track element that includes a series of switches and a signal bridge going over parallel tracks that automatically direct trains into an empty spot at the station. This can be dropped as a single element in front of the station, instead of having to layout all the track switches manually. The game also makes it easier to signal and direct trains by automatically installing signals on parallel tracks. This should make it easier to focus on the more economic parts of the game, but truthfully I wasn’t able to play it enough to see if my theory was correct.

Overall, unless an update comes out to fix the glitches, either go buy the game on another platform or just go back to playing the original Railway Empire on Switch. With graphics the way they are, it probably is not worth the frustration of trying to get it to work. It is a shame as I see that they put work into improving the track laying system, but it just doesn’t look like they put work into the Switch port.