April 2026 Edit:
This game is what I call "aggressively average". I enjoy building in the game. I want to enjoy the gameplay loop. The problem is that this game performs about as well as trying to run Fallout 4 on an Nvidia GTX 640 series graphics card, which is to say: Poorly.
After the Coal & Power update, the development team updated the game to Unreal Engine 5, which locked customers that purchased the game earlier in early access without powerful enough computers from playing versions after that mentioned update. The game however suffered performance wise from that UE5 update. DirectX12 made it worse. My PC warms up now like it's actually got a firebox. If you think I'm ran this on a potato, my other rig had a GTX 1080, the bottleneck for that was an ancient disk drive I got for cheap & that was while the game was so early access you couldn't independently place industries, it costed $2 to chop down a tree & the 8-ton Porter had roughly 7000lbs in Tractive Effort for some reason.
It is challenging to play multiplayer sometimes as connections are peer-to-peer. Dedicated Servers were probably promised but have yet to come to fruition in a public capacity. And when you have a map as big as 32x32 in kilometers, then you may reach levels of performance that makes it a challenge to play without visuals like your locomotive & consist seemingly flying up into space, or down into the void, only to come back to the rails as if you didn't just discover see out of bounds on the client side.
Any promises for updates are as of writing, still promises. Unless the developers are working on features such as terraforming (something that was proposed while game was still in early access as post-launch content), it is as of writing 1 year and around 4 months since the last update.
The developers don't seem like bad people, but definitely are in my opinion stuck-up about their game being fine as it is, even with above 10 issues excluding anything I previously outlined and while I am not a programmer, I wouldn't be surprised if the code has at least one memory leak.
I really want to like Railroads Online, I have been shown that wanting the game to be better is a fool's cause. You'd have a better time buying all of Train Simulator's North American 3 foot Narrow Gauge-related Downloadable content or better yet-making your own model railroad, than buying Railroads Online & any DLC for the suggested price, if you really want this game, buy it on sale or at your own wallet's peril. I enjoy playing the game for about an hour or two at a time. I do not enjoy the developers, don't hate them, just I do not believe they can make a better game trying for this specific niche.

April 2026 Edit: This game is what I call "aggressively average". I enjoy building in the game. I want to enjoy the gameplay loop. The problem is that this game performs about as well as trying to run Fallout 4 on an Nvidia GTX 640 series graphics card, which is to say: Poorly. After the Coal & Power update, the development team updated the game to Unreal Engine 5, which locked customers that purchased the game earlier in early access without powerful enough computers from playing versions after that mentioned update. The game however suffered performance wise from that UE5 update. DirectX12 made it worse. My PC warms up now like it's actually got a firebox. If you think I'm ran this on a potato, my other rig had a GTX 1080, the bottleneck for that was an ancient disk drive I got for cheap & that was while the game was so early access you couldn't independently place industries, it costed $2 to chop down a tree & the 8-ton Porter had roughly 7000lbs in Tractive Effort for some reason. It is challenging to play multiplayer sometimes as connections are peer-to-peer. Dedicated Servers were probably promised but have yet to come to fruition in a public capacity. And when you have a map as big as 32x32 in kilometers, then you may reach levels of performance that makes it a challenge to play without visuals like your locomotive & consist seemingly flying up into space, or down into the void, only to come back to the rails as if you didn't just discover see out of bounds on the client side. Any promises for updates are as of writing, still promises. Unless the developers are working on features such as terraforming (something that was proposed while game was still in early access as post-launch content), it is as of writing 1 year and around 4 months since the last update. The developers don't seem like bad people, but definitely are in my opinion stuck-up about their game being fine as it is, even with above 10 issues excluding anything I previously outlined and while I am not a programmer, I wouldn't be surprised if the code has at least one memory leak. I really want to like Railroads Online, I have been shown that wanting the game to be better is a fool's cause. You'd have a better time buying all of Train Simulator's North American 3 foot Narrow Gauge-related Downloadable content or better yet-making your own model railroad, than buying Railroads Online & any DLC for the suggested price, if you really want this game, buy it on sale or at your own wallet's peril. I enjoy playing the game for about an hour or two at a time. I do not enjoy the developers, don't hate them, just I do not believe they can make a better game trying for this specific niche.