Loco Mogul

Andrew Ewanchyna is among a scant handful of people who've been making their living as indie game developers for years; his most interesting title is Starships Unlimited, a rather innovative 4X game, though Starship Kingdom and Battleship Chess aren't bad either.

He describes Loco Mogul as "a cross between Oasis and Railroad Tycoon."

Curiously, this morning I was thinking about Railroad Tycoon and whether a downloadable remake would be a good idea; the original game fit on a floppy, after all, and in many ways is a superior game to either 2 or 3 of the series. 3D and additional complexity only muddied the waters, really; except for the orignal game's UI for changing a train's consist, which is awkward and tedious, it's well nigh a perfect game.

Unfortunately (by my standards, anyway), Loco Mogul isn't that; instead, it's a sort of casualized railroad tycoon game. The analogy to Oasis derives from the fact that, on each level, you're presented with a square grid of territory, unexplored except for one town, and click on squares to "survey" them. Red numbers appear, Minesweeper-like, if you survey a square adjoining to one or more locations that need rail service -- towns, lumber yards, coal mines and the like. It costs money to survey a square, so you want to discover all the important locations with a minimum of clicks.

Once you've done so, you lay rail (which may require surveying new squares to build an optimal layout), and build stations; then, you have some number of days to operate your railroad. You have only a single train; boxcars appear, bouncing above some locations, with a letter code indicating where they want to go, and you move your train about, earning money each time you deliver a load to its destination.

Thus, strategy involves building as efficient a track layout as possible, and in routing your train as efficiently as possible.

Money persists from level to level, and you can eventually upgrade your train, and work to buy out your investors and acquire sole control of your company.

Loco Mogul a bit of a disappointment for me, since I would love a game with the depth of Sid Meier's original title and without the claptrap that got appended to the series over time -- and games like Starships Unlimited certainly suggest that Ewanchyna would be capable of doing such a game. But we may hope, at least, that the more casual approach he's adopted will provide a wider audience for his work.