Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon Mobile

Sid Meier’s probably done more to extinguish the stigma attached to an enthusiastic interest in trains than anyone else in recent memory, thanks to his series of immensely popular Railroad Tycoon games. So we can approach the mobile adaptation excitedly, without fear of being branded as tragic, anorak-wearing trainspotters.

Squeezing all those miles of track into a mobile game is no small task, but it seems developer Connect2Media has done an admirable job without having to streamline the complex strategy game on which it's based.

Thankfully, there's a concise, hands on tutorial to teach you the ways of railroad management, which blends with the gameplay to ease you into the action without spoiling any of its enjoyment. That said, Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon doesn't actually have a particularly complex objective - just a very in-depth way of achieving it.

Your goal is simply to make money by building a new railway network. Naturally it costs money (a lot of money) to lay the track, but by carefully choosing your roots and linking up important trade centres a steady flow of revenue will begin to build your fortune.

Each city connected by your new network of trains has its own set of supplies and demands. This allows you to carefully manage your trade routes, bringing the goods that the city requires, while helping it to export its products to neighbouring settlements.

The intricacies of Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon are many - far too many to list here. Suffice to say there is never a shortage of ways to make (and lose) money, and while the graphics are quite basic, their primary purpose is to make the game as functional as possible, which is precisely what they do.

Simple controls combined with very helpful and intuitive contextual menus make it easy to build, manage and capitalise upon your network, which ultimately makes this a fully functional and impressively recognisable adaptation of the full PC game.

Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon Mobile

The original, expansive PC title distilled into an equally absorbing and detailed – if rather basic looking – mobile game. The intelligence of the series has been fully maintained through easy access and plenty of strategising to sink your teeth into
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Spanner Spencer
Spanner Spencer
Yes. Spanner's his real name, and he's already heard that joke you just thought of. Although Spanner's not very good, he's quite fast, and that seems to be enough to keep him in a regular supply of free games and away from the depressing world of real work.