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- Price: $0.99 (Get it)
- Version: 1.1
- Official Site: Floor 84 Games
“Oh no! What have you done?”
You’ll undoubtedly be hearing this again and again in Railroad Madness, the ‘traffic management’ game from Floor 84. It’s the fail state — a foppish conductor flailing his hands about, gasping in horror at the collision of trains you’ve caused, leaving fruit or bodies or whatever strewn violently across the tracks.
If a bit overstated, it’s at least testament to PopCap’s method of rewarding casual gamers. A gradual learning curve sees the player doing little of consequence or real skill, acclimating to the difficulty of something not all that difficult and liberally doling out pats on the back in heaps of rainbows. It works.
And this is the biggest failing of Railroad Madness. Tasked with managing trains down a series of vertically crisscrossing tracks, you’re to guide them into one of two stations, a cargo and a passenger station. Failure to guide a train into the proper station results in a penalty, while crashing them into each other sees the aforementioned conductor throwing a fit and you restarting your game.
The difficulty ramps up quickly, with trains of different speeds cascading within a minute or so, the pleasantly sterile aesthetic often masking which train is which when you start to play at a pace. While a recent update changed the default controls from an awkward tap system — which created an additional, infuriating quadrilateral puzzle game on top of the already brisk ‘management sim’ — to a more forgiving swipe system, it’s still a mess.
Little words of encouragement pop up along the bottom of the screen as you successfully guide cars to their destinations, barely visible and accompanied by a cacophony of clattering trains — the games droning soundtrack which only serves to increase the tension.
A tutorial and worldwide scoreboard are included with what is otherwise a single web of tracks. It’s what you’d expect for 99 cents but not what you’d want from a decent casual game, or even comparable traffic management games. The player is to be rewarded. The little flourishes make all the difference and perhaps Railroad Madness would be more at home on something like Kongregate, as it is a mess in the confines of the iPhone’s tiny screen. Difficult and workmanlike — that’s not a compliment.
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