What a great transport management/tycoon game. The time flew by when playing this, without me even noticing it. I would guess that you can complete the achievements in about 30 hours, however.. I spend a lot more time on the game, just having fun.
Approximate time to 100%: Around 30 hours or more
Estimated achievement difficulty: 3/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: You don't need a guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Not really, as it is easy to start a new save. I do recommend making manual saves regularly and giving them a good name, so you can keep on going from an earlier point if you need to
Grinding Achievements: Yes, connecting the whole world and completing 1k tasks is quite a lot
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: Not sure, you can use the setting for no competitors and a higher loan. I'm unsure if achievements unlock in sandbox mode.
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No
Gamepad or mouse and keyboard: mouse and keyboard
In Worldwide Rush, you choose a starting location and then grow your transport business. You'll be transporting people, and let cities blossom while also increasing your company's income and probably buying out your competitors. From your starting location, you'll be connecting routes to other cities by bus, train, airplane, or boat. The town itself will tell you where the people in it want to go. It can also have visitors who want to go somewhere other than the main population. When holding your mouse on a city, you'll see green lines going out, which are where people from that city want to go, but you also see red lines coming into the city to indicate which other cities have people who want to go to that city. If you don't meet the requirements for those people, it may reset, and people want to go to a different location. If you meet all the requirements, the city will grow, have more people, and they will have demands for more locations. So you start with a small vehicle, but by buying more of them, you unlock bigger or faster ones. In the transportation menu, you can see the requirements to unlock the next one. You'll buy hubs in multiple cities so you can start transport from those locations as well and try to meet the demands of more and more cities, even those without your hub in them.
There are three modes available in Worldwide Rush: Classic mode, Discovery Mode, and Sandbox Mode. You choose the type you want to play when starting a new save file. I played mostly classic mode as I could unlock achievements easily that way, and it also let me choose between so many settings before starting my save file. The preset setting is for 30 competitors, but you can decide how many, and even zero is an option. And it also gives you the option to change the inflation, or if you start with a standard, higher, or lower loan.
I love this game and lost myself in it completely. Played for over 40 hours within 3 days, as I just couldn't stop playing. Most of the time, I even forgot the time until I looked up, and it was a completely different part of the day. It has that perfect loop of making progress in a short amount of time. You can quickly fix this, plan that, improve the quirks on that route, and maybe also improve the route itself. Combine that with the game giving you small tasks each month for which it will reward you if you complete them (but there isn't any punishment for not achieving them). This even adds more of the "quickly doing this and that" feeling.
While I loved playing through Worldwide Rush, it has a few shortcomings. Worldwide Rush has a lot of menus and settings. And a lot of them have the option to pin them, some of the menus don't, and I missed that in those. You can hire help for each hub. However, you don't have much control over their work. It is just a setting of whether they should maintain the lines starting in that city, or if they are even allowed to expand. And while at the beginning I liked that they could work on their own, as your network gets quite big. They are not that good with planning... they add more and more and more vehicles to that line. Even if that means the vehicles are less full because not that many people want to move that way. I really missed some options to manage them. And I would even like the option to hire someone who cuts all the lines that have less efficiency than a percentage you select yourself. But with that option, I would also like to see the option to lock routes, so the hired help is not allowed to change anything.
While connecting cities is easy to understand and execute, I really did struggle with some objectives to "connect" whole nations. Not if it was just connecting A to B, that is simple, have a vehicle route between them. But there are tasks where they want you to connect the whole nation. And in a single country, you can connect them by one big route, but that isn't efficient. However, countries with colonies in a different part of the world are a whole other beast. I even added them to that same one route thing, but still never was able to complete that task for countries with colonies (looking at you, France!). I'm unsure if this is a bug or if I do not understand those tasks correctly.
Worldwide Rush doesn't really have missable achievements. If you weren't able to do something, it is easy to start a new save file and try again. I think it is possible to complete all the achievements in under 30 hours, but I took my sweet, sweet time and just had so much fun. It has achievements for France, the UK & Ireland, Germany, Japan, and China to connect the whole country by train. I do recommend doing this on a save file with no competitors and with all vehicle options on (and don't hire staff for the hubs). As this is a great one to combine with "connecting the whole world". Which is the most challenging achievement in this game. What I learned on my last achievement (Completing a total of 1k tasks, doesn't have to be on the same save file), is that on the main menu and the pause menu, it has an option to see the stats, and here you can see how far you are with achievements. It was so lovely to see how close to 1k completed tasks I was. I wish I had figured that out sooner.
I give Worldwide Rush 4 out of 5 stars. It was so addictive, and often, I completely lost track of time when playing it.
4.0