Reviewed: November 18, 2004
Reviewed by: Roger Cox

Publisher
Atari

Developer
Chris Sawyer

Released: : September 7, 2004
Genre: Strategy
Players: 2
ESRB: Everyone

4
3
3
3
3.9

System Requirements:

Your goal is to build a transportation empire. Use railroads, trucking lines, buses, airplanes and ships to outmaneuver ruthless competitors and see who is best at meeting the needs of a growing metropolis. Cash in on a world of opportunity moving raw materials, goods and people efficiently from one destination to another. Rake in huge profits as the years advance from 1900 to 2000 and beyond.

• Develop a vast world rich in resources
• Lay down tracks, roads, and bridges to deliver goods and services to people
• Build a transportation Empire
• Compete against the ruthless computer
• Challenge a friend for head-to-head multiplayer action
• Over 40 pre-designed scenarios

You have the option of viewing the tutorial or not. If you decide to check it out, it will show you how to do the basics, but will never get you involved in the process. However, it is possible to take control of the tutorial, but doing so will stop it dead in its tracks (pardon the pun).

Overall, this portion of the game is a disappointment because it lacks the basic hands-on approach that most modern games offer. With Locomotion’s poorly designed interface, it should have been a requirement to view it prior to game play. On the other hand, maybe it was a good idea not to force people to watch this boring and inapt tutorial. There is no audio presentation, merely small text to read in the short amount of time that’s given. As a side note, don’t actually do what the tutorial says to do because doing so will actually cancel the tutorial all together.

When it comes to the game’s single player mode, it’s pretty vast. You can choose a wide range of missions, which are set in a variety of different locations and time periods. The mission objectives range from beating your competition, to simply making a profit, but your overall goal remains, to build the most effective and successful transportation empire as possible.

The locations you play in vary from mountainous lands, to flat plains, to a variety of islands. Time periods in the game range from the early 1900s, to the present and on into the future. As the time periods change you can build newer types of transportation systems that are invented along the way. It’s a nice feature that makes playing a single game potentially lengthy and ever changing.

I found myself returning to levels in which I had beaten in order to keep expanding and updating my transportation systems to the newest available methods associated with the current time period. During the whole experience I was frustrated by all of the micromanagement I was forced to do in order to keep my empire running.

You are required to do regular maintenance on each vehicle in your fleet. Not only is it costly, but it’s extremely time consuming, not to mention frustrating. Regrettably, things need to be maintained too much and it seriously bogs down on the fun factor. I’d rather be building more roads than repairing stuff. Chris Sawyer didn’t know “when to say when” to realism.

There are three preset difficulty categories: beginner, experienced, and advanced. The beginner missions are easy like you’d expect, while the experienced mode is definitely more challenging. It’s in the advanced missions that you begin to feel as though the computer is cheating. There is no way that the computer could possibly have enough cash flow to build such a vast transportation network in such a short amount of time. Good luck to everyone that attempts to beat the computer in the advanced stages. Doing so fills you with a great sense of accomplishment.

That is not the only annoying aspect of this game. Laying down railroad tracks, roads, and bridges isn’t easy. For those of you familiar with the Sim City series, you know that to lay down a road you simply click on the road symbol and press the left mouse button to lay the road down in the direction you point. The coolest thing about building roads in that game is that you can do it very easily and efficiently.

However, in order to build a road in Locomotion, you must:

1. Select the road you wish to build
2. Select the direction you wish the road piece to be going, facing, and/or curving
3. Left click on the map in the desired location
4. Proceed to left click on the build button to lay each additional piece of road in that direction
5. You must select the desired direction you wish the road to go for each piece of road

There is a fairly robust scenario editor that is slightly entertaining to use. You first chose the continent you wish to build on: Alpine Mountains, Great Britain, or North America. From there you can customize everything from the sea level to forest density. It has a lot of options that allow you to be creative.

Once you get your transportation empire established, it can be fun to sit back and observe much like the train-set I played with as a kid. Watching my transportation empire run was the limited extent of my enjoyment in Locomotion.

I personally wish this game were in full 3D and not 2D for various reasons. For one, was this game not released just a month or so ago? Second, do we not live in the age of evolving 3D graphics? Finally, aren’t people tired of 2D, overhead perspective games?

You can rotate the view in 90-degree increments along with being able to zoom in and out. It’s annoying that you must use the keyboard in order to rotate the camera angle because this is a feature that you’ll be using often. Camera rotation should have been designed for use with the mouse and not the keyboard, or at least options for both.

Unfortunately, it wouldn’t let me zoom in close enough to see what I was doing. On the other hand, I was able to zoom out to a world map, which was utterly useless. You always feel as though you are playing from a great distance away so for them to say you can zoom in is a joke (although technically it isn’t). This is yet another very frustrating aspect of Locomotion.

You can customize the resolution setting from 800 x 600, all the way up to 1600 x 1200. Even at its highest resolution setting, Locomotion’s graphics fall in with the lower echelon of games this year.

Overall, Locomotion’s music and sound effects are reminiscent of games from the mid-‘90s.

Locomotion may have some redeeming value extremely deep down that only people who stick with the game will discover. It’s a big game that in rare instances can be enthralling. There is a multiplayer mode in which you can compete against your friends’ one at a time. Unfortunately, there is only one-on-one competition to be found, and with no universal Internet site playing host. In order to play a two-player game, you must be on a LAN or dial-up while one player sets him/herself up to host the game.

Locomotion offers gamers nothing new or innovative and it shows in all aspects of the game. It currently sells for $30, which is three times what its minimum cost should be. Everyone would be better off picking up a copy of the critically acclaimed game Sim City 4 and for a mere $10 more you can get the Deluxe Edition which includes the original plus the Rush Hour expansion.