Ah, yes, Railway Empire 2's first DLC, focused on eastern Europe and luxury trains like the world famous Orient Express.
So, is it any good? Let's see what we get:
One new scenario
A new Balkan map
A bunch of new wares to manufacture and transport
Six new locomotives
The option to create "Luxury Trains"
10 new music pieces.
And now lets try to evaluate every of those new additions and see if it's worth the price
The new scenario is... Well, exactly that. A new scenario. It doesn't really do anything different from the already existing scenarios except of course use the new map with all of it's additions. Not much to say here honestly.
The new map is probably the greatest and by far best addition in this DLC. It's not overly big, certainly smaller than the american and european maps in the base game, but makes up for it by having far more variety and just generally being more interesting. It looks honestly beautiful. The map starts off in the lush, green meadows and forests of the outer alpine region transition into a more dark and ominous tone of the eastern european plains and hills and end in the more brown and yellow drylands of the oriental bosporus. Of course, the usual rivers and white-capped mountains are also present. The latter especially make for some great challenges. Laying your track through the outer alps or even the Carpathians takes quite a bit of skill, patience and a healthy bit of funding - especially if you try to keep your tracks somewhat realistic. I think its fair to say that the Balkan is the most difficult map currently in game and I feel like especially more experienced players will have some great fun conquering it.
Sadly it's not all rainbows and sunshine. Yes, the mountains add a nice difficulty but there seem to be a few business and even the odd town that can't be feasibly connected to your network without giving your track some ridiculous slopes or make the track so long that you can't use them for passengers anymore. Further the devs for some reason used the american style for the track instead of the european one - and to see clearly american trestle bridges over the Danube River or tunnels with wild-west-style wooden supports through the alps feels a bit off. It might just be a tiny detail but... Why? My last point when it comes to the map is the sound design - while that is generally quite robust sadly it has the same audio issue the vanilla maps have: for some reason the devs use ONE (very loud) athmospheric audio loop that is played EVERYWHERE on the map. Why the heck do I hear ocean waves in the Capathians?!
Then there's the locomotives. It has to be said, those do look amazing! There's nothing really to critizise when it comes to their models. They're a joy to see running over the map and through the amazing landscape. But again, they went kinda lazy on those. For example the six new locomotives use the same hand full of sounds as all the other locomotives in game, no matter their year or type. Granted, that was already an issue of the base game but I don't get the reason here either. All of the sounds are already copied from the first game, so why not use ALL the sounds of the first game and not limit them to maybe six different sound sets? The balancing also seems to be a bit off. Why do we have new mixed locomotives that have a fair bit more pulling power than the strongest freight engines while being almost as fast as the best express trains? I get that they want the players to use their shiny new locos, but they basically made 90 percent of the locomotives in the game redundant as soon as you research the new ones.
Let's take a look at the new wares. Those are fluff, plain and simple. They add to the overall feel, but don't change anything gameplay wise. It just doesn't make a difference if you transport canned meat or canned cheese.
And whats up with the luxury trains. Well... Those exist now. You create a new train line, tick a little box and WHOOP, it's a luxury train. It gets new (quite good looking) carriages and that's about it. You can adjust the ticket price for those train but how much passengers are willing to pay or what influences that is sadly not communicated. By the point you can actually create luxury trains, which is the 1870s, so the mid-game you usually are already swimming in money and have connected most of the map, so again the feature seems a bit lazily implemented and sadly doesn't really add anything new gameplay wise.
Speaking of gameplay: you want to hear something funny? You can't recreate the Orient Express - THE big figurehead of this entire DLC. Since they didn't change anything in how the game calculates passenger demand from the main game. As such it only checks for demand for the 20 closest cities to a selected starting point. Vienna and Constantinople are the furthest cities apart from each other (I mean, that is the idea of the Orient Express after all). So the game never checks for any passenger demand between Vienna and Constantinople, meaning no one will use a train between the two. Way to go Kalypso, I see someone really gave all of this some thought!
The new music pieces are nice and rather athmospheric but since there are only ten and they are the only music you'll hear on the new map they can get boring quite quickly.
So what's the conclusion? For a map of this size, 10 bucks is probably a fair price. Still, the whole DLC adds nothing really revolutionary in terms of gameplay and sadly feels a bit lazily implemented at certain points. If you're a reailroad enthusiast and always wanted to create your own version of the Orient Express (that doesn't work in game) or just want to try out a new challenging map you'll probably have some fun with this DLC. Still, for most people it will probably not add enough new content of substance so I sadly can't reccommend it here.