You already know

Kuju love steam engines - the drivers are well modelled too.

There's little point in making a protracted conclusion to this review. Railway enthusiasts, with a decent enough PC, will thoroughly enjoy this, and should totally ignore the scores below - it's simply a far better product than MST and Kuju appear to be strongly committed to a long-term support. As for everyone else, even keen sim fans, it's unlikely to float your boat straight away: the learning curve is vertical, thanks to the dearth of starter missions; the graphics are several years old; the scenarios are rather simple. However, MST's community supported that game fanatically, with a multitude of add-ons, and there's no doubt that Rail Simulator will be treated in the same manner. So although it might not be a great game now, give a year or so and the content should be substantial.

EA should be given a fair bit of credit for having the guts to take on and publish a title with such a limited audience, especially given many of their other 2007 titles have been clearly developed for the mass market. Hopefully, Rail Simulator will sell enough copies to convince everyone involved that another train game is worth doing, allowing Kuju to correct the flaws in this one.

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

Component	Publisher's Minimum	Publisher's Recommended
Processor	1.7GHz or faster	Not specified
Memory	512 MB
Graphics Card	64MB with Pixel Shader 2.0 (PCIe/AGP only)
Graphics Card Example	NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 / ATI Radeon 9500 Pro or greater
Free Disk Space	6 GB
Net Link	Not specified

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

Component	YouGamers Minimum	YouGamers Recommended
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 3200+ / Intel Pentium 4 550	AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ / Intel Core 2 Duo E6300
Memory	1 GB	2 GB
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon X700 128MB / NVIDIA GeForce 6600 128MB	ATI Radeon X1900 256MB / NVIDIA GeForce 7800 256MB
Free Disk Space	6 GB	6 GB
Net Link	Not specified	Not specified

Scores

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

Gameplay	76	There's little to interest a casual gamer, even one with more than a passing interest in trains and their operation. For the enthusiast though, there's a wealth of entertainment to be had, after plenty of practice and tweaking though.
Graphics	70	Functional at best but can be quite poor, especially compared to what can be achieved with Flight Sim X. An improvement over the previous train sim games though.
Audio	82	Train effects are gloriously rich and life-like, but stations are deathly silent. The lack of tannoy announcements and general hub-bub spoil the realism somewhat.
Technology	72	Scales back down to a low level but looks awful like this. At the highest settings, it's rather jerky, even on the best PCs, and one is limited to what one can achieve with the editing package.

OVERALL

Ultimately, there's just not enough of a game here for most players. Rail enthusiasts, with the time and patience to tinker with the editor, will adore it; everyone else are likely to be bored with minutes.

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