Train tycoon sim Railway Empire on track for January arrival

Railway Empire is a tycoon sim about building up a rail network in the mid-19th century United States. You plonk down stations, micromanage routes, choose which staff to hire and fire, and upgrade your trains with on-board toilets and padded seats. Publisher Kalypso (of the more recent Tropico games) has announced that it's due to arrive on January 26.

Laying out all the tracks to design the most efficient network possible (or a monstrous zig-zagging mess) could prove satisfying, and there's a few extra activities away from your train network including purchasing farms and trading on the stock market to keep you interested. If you want to relax, you can take a first-person ride in one of your carriages, too.

There's a campaign in which you try to outgrow your peers—you can sabotage their empires to gain the upper hand—and a scenario mode for focused expansion, plus free play and an informal 'model making' mode that will be more like playing with a toy train set.

The video below gives you a good, brief overview of what the etarly stages of the game look like. Early purchasers get access to the closed beta, and it's currently £33.99/$42.49 on Steam.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.