Railroad Constructor is best described as a clone of another puzzle game that you may have played. Remember that game where you have a bunch of tiles on the screen and you have to place various pipes together to form a path through which water can flow? This is that game, only the pipes are train tracks and the water is, well... the water is trains, just like you'd figure.
If you decide to give Railroad Constructor a shot, as you very well may considering the current $0.99 price tag, what you'll get is a reasonably competent puzzle title with few frills but enough entertainment to justify the space that it will occupy on your iPod Touch or similar device. The price seems like a bargain at first, but if you play the game for a half-hour or so, you will essentially have seen everything and done everything enough times that you no longer care to continue.
When you begin a new game, you'll find yourself looking at a map that depicts a wilderness wasteland of some sort. A train is positioned along the lower left side of the screen and a station is positioned along the upper right side of the screen. You hold the iPod or iPhone vertically, in its standard orientation, and you have 01:20 to place tracks on the screen so that they provide safe passage between the aforementioned two points on the edges of the screen. That task is accomplished by pulling pieces of track from one of two available piles on the screen and placing them in a blank space. You don't have to connect each successive piece, if you don't want. If neither of the two pieces currently available suit your current needs, you can place one piece or the other off to the side in a space that your tracks theoretically will never reach. There also are five bombs provided in each round, so that if you accidentally place a bit of track where you don't want it (or if your track later evolves so that it needs to pass through a place where you previously assumed it wouldn't and you now need to eliminate junk pieces) you can undo the mistake. Unfortunately, there is no option to move track to a helpful location once it has been placed, so there's a lot of guess work involved.
There are a few other minor complications with which to concern yourself, as well. For instance, lakes and boulders are positioned within each new map, so you'll have to build track to pass around such obstacles. Additionally, there are gold deposits placed in various locations, as well. If you can design your tracks to pass through those bars, each one nets you a cool 100 points. You also receive 10 points for every 3 seconds that your train remains in motion without crashing, which can build up as you go through new stages. Your game ends the first time your train crashes, whether that's in the first stage or the 12th, so you want to get the most that you can out of each stage where things do go your way.
One problem with the game's design is that it quickly grows repetitive. Levels are randomized, which was a good idea since essentially the only reason you would keep playing is to beat a previous best score, but they aren't randomized in a particularly interesting fashion. A lot of gold bars will appear way out of your way and it's unlikely that you'll risk building track in their direction when you can simply go the easy route and build your way to another level that might consist of more favorable gold bar placement. There's really no reward here for taking risks or for making the most of early stages, since difficulty doesn't ramp up in a noticeable manner. Stage five really offers no challenges that the first one didn't.
Another concern is piece selection. Since there are only two pieces available at any one time, you won't often actually have a good piece available. There are an awful lot of rounded corners that you must waste time to place, and you might have five or six pieces in a row that are absolute rubbish. A game like Tetris worked well because many of the pieces were useful, but here the odds are fairly good that only one in three or four pieces is actually all that useful. Most of the time if you have to put thought into anything at all, it's to consider for a moment your likelihood of getting a crummy selection of pieces compared to your likelihood of falling victim to a total disaster. Of course this has the intended effect of making progression more challenging, but the downside is obvious: it's not much fun to spend most of your time tossing aside all but useless pieces as your remaining time for the current stage dwindles toward nothing. Besides that, you could eventually run out of space and bombs.
Though the above two issues are irritating, the biggest problem with the game is that it doesn't really feel like you've gotten anywhere even when you do make progress. That's true for reasons besides the aforementioned lack of increased difficulty from one stage to another. The scenery also doesn't change much. As a result, Railroad Constructor feels like a game of endurance more than it does an actual construction set. You just keep trying again on new maps and maybe things will go your way. Maybe they won't. It's difficult to feel any particular sense of investment in the outcome when so little of it feels like it's actually in your hands.
None of that is meant as a knock on the game's graphics or sound, by the way. The soundtrack, though limited, feels perfectly appropriate for the subject matter. The visuals, though simplistic, actually have a certain charm and effectiveness to them. You won't make mistakes because of poor visual design. You'll always be able to tell the effect that a piece will have where you place it, and for that matter, the touch controls work almost perfectly. Occasionally you might have to tap a piece twice to activate it when a first tap doesn't have the intended effect, or placement may go wrong, but the game's pace is such that mistakes of that order are uncommon and not a real deterrent.
Though Railroad Constructor is unlikely to win any awards, developer Exosyphen Studios has at least provided a decent diversion and at the right price. You could do a lot worse for your dollar.
Rating: C
