Chris Sawyer's Locomotion [PC]

With Locomotion and the forthcoming Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, Chris Sawyer, the biggest tycoon of them all, is having a bumper season. However, this remake of his 1990s classic Transport Tycoon isn't anywhere near the advance you'd expect from a nine-year gap. There's a fine strategy game under here somewhere, but the clumsy interface and staid presentation mean few people will have the patience to find it.

Although Locomotion, like the original games, lets you construct road, air, and shipping networks, it's really a huge train set. The map's covered in towns, industries, and factories just waiting for an enterprising firm to set about moving goods, passengers and mail from one place to another. You provide the infrastructure, buy rolling stock, set down routes, and receive money depending on the quantity of goods you transport and the time you take to do it. Other companies are competing for the same money.

Over time, your vehicles deteriorate and break down more often, affecting your bottom line. If you serve communities well, they prosper and grow -- conversely, if you ignore them, they stagnate and evaporate. Years pass in a matter of a few minute and different technologies become available; over the course of a long game you go from 1910s steam engines to modern electric passenger trains, supersonic airliners, and so on.

Just like the originals, Locomotion is presented in isometric 2D. Now there's nothing wrong with 2D, but there's no getting around the fact that Locomotion not only fell out of the ugly tree, but hit every branch on the way down. We're tempted to say that it looks better at higher resolutions, but it's really more that the objects get so small that you can't make out the horribleness. The music's also pretty nasty.

Track building has been changed for 2004, and the new system is a bit of a mixed blessing. Laying the track has the interface straight from Rollercoaster Tycoon, and although it's possible to build proper curves now, building long stretches is a laborious task requiring much clicking. There's also no way to find out how much a line is going to cost before building it.

Although the process of buying trains and road vehicles is slightly easier, they seem to decay a lot faster than before, and there's still no quick way to replace an engine without stopping the train, removing the old one, then painstakingly recreating the route before sending it on its way. Thanks to the absence of depots, maintaining your fleet is simpler, but this was a much-needed addition that hasn't materialized.

It's not fair to assume that Locomotion is a complete step backwards. Now you can build trams, which can run along tracks set into roads, and are very handy in the early game. Underground, you can construct intricate networks of tunnels complete with corners and stations rather than the simple straight-line underpasses of the original.

On the other hand, some of the extended financial features of the older Tycoon games, like being able to fund new industries and purchase stock in other companies, are gone. Infuriatingly, you also can't see a station's coverage area until you've already cleared the area where it's going to go -- particularly problematic if you're trying to drop one in the middle of a city.

Two players can compete in the game's multiplayer mode, but you might have an interesting time finding an opponent. Long, involved games like this don't suit pick-up-and-play sessions very well, so you might want to have a friend in mind ahead of time.

Locomotion includes a number of scenarios, mostly based around making a certain amount of profit or fulfilling some other related goal within a time limit. They're grouped into difficulty levels, and should give both beginners and veterans a decent challenge. A convenient button to play a random sandbox game is available, but buried.

AI was a big problem with the original games. The rail and road networks it created often seemed like the work of some diseased mind. Matters are improved somewhat, and the AI is more of a credible opponent, but it still has the habit of building ludicrously ambitious raised sections where simpler alternatives exist.

Given decent (or even bearable) visuals, an overhauled interface, and a lot more care and attention, Locomotion could still rival the best of the management genre, just like it did nine years ago. This attempt, though, smacks of tokenism and carelessness. Thanks to the efforts of fans, Transport Tycoon Deluxe has been patched and modified to work with modern operating systems, and it's more fully featured, has an interface that's just as good, and arguably is better looking. Somewhat appropriately, Locomotion is about five years too late.