Railway Empire
Fair · Strategy · 2018
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $29.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 20.5h
- Value
- $1.46/hr
- Reviews
- 83% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, nVidia GeForce GTX460 or AMD Radeon HD5870 (1024MB VRAM with Shader Model 5.0), 7 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, Linux.
In Railway Empire, you will create an elaborate and wide-ranging rail network, purchase over 40 different trains modelled in extraordinary detail, and buy or build railway stations, maintenance buildings, factories and tourist attractions to keep your travel network ahead of the competition.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $5.99. That was October 2024. It has been discounted 66 times in the 9 years tracked here, typically at 70 percent off, with about 7 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 5 percent on value. It is pricier than 97 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 84 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Rail Route ($9.99, scores 76) beats it on value, while it beats Bounty Train ($9.99, scores 29).
The press gave it 74; the people who bought it give it 83 percent. A 9-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 10 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written June 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 36 percent of the 365 reviews written there were positive, against 83 percent overall, and those are 5 percent of everything written about it.
20.5 hours to finish it, 272 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 13 times the campaign.
The drop-off
90% start to <1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
142 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
An interesting & challenging game with minor flaws. I enjoyed setting up tracks/routes and signals & switches. Seeing trains running smoothly (not a lot of wait time) is satisfying but not easy. The main goal of the game is to grow cities. You accomplish that by providing resources scattered around the map. That's where the challenge comes. Getting them to cities efficiently requires a well thought out plan from the...
Estou jogando no linux CachyOs. Roda liso, plug and play. Não precisei configurar nada.
Very bad hitboxes, intersections of raiways are really hard to build. Game would be really enjoyable without all those dowsides who make it really unfun when you realize you just lost your scenario because a monument hitbox is twice as large as the red square displayed, so you can't connect to a train station you built 3 hours ago. I've given this game many chances over several years, today was the last straw.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Railway Empire scores 65/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/503940/railway-empireThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 17, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.