I have always loved the Railroad Tycoon series since I first played the second in the series. And of course I loved the third one…until Windows Vista/7 came along and nearly ruined it. But I always liked the idea of a transportation game that included more than just trains. Insert Transport Tycoon…which was too old to run on my computer. Locomotion, its spiritual sequel, did however. But being the classic 2D, isometric style game, me personally it was good and I will admit I played a lot of it in the past year or more but being partial to full 3D games, I longed for a ‘modern’ version of it.
Insert Transport Fever. What I wished for long ago has now come true. Now I have not tried out the previous game they made, Train Fever, because by the time I heard about it I had been reading a lot about late game problems with optimization and it being nearly unplayable when you get a big enough train empire. And hearing that the same company was doing Transport Fever, I was a little scared that might happen again. Well simply said I think they have dealt with that problem as I played a Free Game (Endless Game Mode) and had my company run from 1940 to 2003 without a problem. It was a large map and I didn’t have everything everywhere connected, maybe a quarter to a third of the entire map I had under my control, but I didn’t notice anything horrible happening with optimization. I wasn’t running with any mods at the time so for all I know that might change it down the line.
I figured I’d get that out of the way right off the bat so there you are. Meanwhile, the game is what I was really hoping would be, a spiritual sequel to Locomotion and it has held that so far. You can run everything, truck line, bus/tram line, planes, boats, and of course trains. You can run everything you need between the two, for example if there’s a big lake in between two industries that you need to connect, you can have a train haul one to a dock, the boat hauls to the opposite side of the lake and a truck line will haul from there. The one thing I’ve noticed is that industry, for lack of a better description, doesn’t “trust” you right off the bat.
Say you have a couple of coal mines you want to haul to the mill and its a long journey so you want to have as many cars as possible and fully loaded to do so. Then when you setup your tracks, line, and get the locomotive(s) and cars all ready and have it sent to mine to load up, the mine may have 100 loads stored but it will only put out a couple on the station. So you’ll spend most of that time seeing a more than half empty train running back and forth between stations until a couple of runs are done then the mine will finally “trust” you enough to start filling up the train more and more until the point you have more loads than your train can handle. You can set it to “wait until full” but that just means it takes longer for the mine to “trust” you. The one plus about setting it to “wait until full” besides the obvious get large amounts of money when it’s delivered is that the maintenance costs of running are slightly decreased until it runs again.
The many vehicles and wagons you get can all be painted different colors for those vanity people out there, except unlike Locomotion where you can set up an overall colors for different thing (Steam trains get this color, passenger cars get another color, etc.,) each vehicle, train, etc. gets its own color that you can choose from.
So in other words you can’t have a blue locomotive with red cars, they’re all the same color but the thing I’m thinking is that this game is totted on being fully moddable so I’m sure someone out there will make something to allow you to paint everything to your hearts desire.
And speaking of moddable, if you haven’t figured it out already, the game has Steam workshop support so you can mod/find mods to the end of the world I’m sure. But of course give it time now, the game just came out.
There is no multiplayer but there are two single player campaigns, one of the US from the Transcontinental Railroad onwards and the other being Europe starting with the Gotthard Tunnel in Sweden. Each mission has voice over which is very nice instead of having to read what you have to do but that is as much voice acting there is in the game, the rest is just trains, planes, and automobiles noises, among others.
150 years of vehicles to choose from and depending on the situation either a fair amount of money or not much that you have to make sure you don’t overspend it. There’s not much technical money involved like Railroad Tycoon such as stock and bonds and buying another company or anything like that, strictly deliver A to B to make money, maintain vehicles, and if need be get a loan from the bank. Have a good income, you can get a large amount of money from loans while if you’re struggling, you can only get so much.
Vehicles don’t seem to break down but then again I had them auto replaced when they reached there max running age (which depends on the vehicle) but usually 40 years or so they get auto replaced with a new locomotive. So for all I know after max year it starts to break down but one thing you must remember is that the longer you have the vehicle the more maintenance it costs.
Related to trains, if anyone remembers Locomotion or before, is that trains we’re not smart. If you set up the line wrong trains would collide and destroy everything and you’d have to rebuy not only the locomotive but the entire train again. Transport Fever has far smarter engineers and they will not hit each other no matter how hard you want them to the point sometimes signals aren’t entirely needed. However signals do make trains more efficient and they know where to go more quickly. The AI is a bit picky however, they seem to have an idea in there “head” that sometimes they refuse to change there mind about. For example I had two lines running from a factory that makes construction materials for towns. One line with two trains that hauled stone from a quarry to the factory then another line with one train that hauled the construction materials to the nearby town. I set up the station at the factory to have two lines so both trains could unload at the same time but only one track for a short time leading to the town that both the first line and the second line connected to. Multiple times I would have one train leaving the station with one wanting to approach it and even though one could have the right away or the other could wait for the other to get to the station then leave, both would just sit there saying “Waiting for clear path” when there was one. So I would be forced to make a signal that was set to “One Way” only for a split second to allow one of the trains to move.
In the end you might as well use two tracks at all times but even then sometimes the “engineers” are a bit weird. They’ll cross onto the opposite track just to instantly go back to there original track but I believe that has to do with speed, the train wants to move as fast as possible and if the curve it’s on slows it down it’ll want to move to the faster curve but I don’t know if that’s true or not.
Speaking of which, some quality of life over the older transport games. Vehicles show there age over time, tight curves makes rail cars wheels screech loudly and locomotive have to slow down for the curve and of course the brakes screech when they come to a stop. Stations of any type, rail, boat, etc., can be upgraded on the spot without having to demolish everything around it (unless it’s one of your rails/roads/buildings) so that they can handle more vehicles at once or more lines, etc. so they don’t bottleneck. Along with if you really wish you could see what it’s like from the vehicles point of view, when you select them you can press the camera button the pop up and it will take you to a “bumper camera” on the front of the vehicle.
It’s a nice little addition, but now if only there was a day/night cycle in the game that would make it very nice.
Overall I’m very happy this game is out. It’s a proper upgrade from Locomotion and all the older transport games and I see myself playing this for a long time simply because it’s what I like. I want to see how efficiently I can run my trains, how much money I can actually make (instead of spending it all like a madman like I always do) and how big my empire can get. And with all the modding coming I’ve very much looking forward to how many vehicles can be added to the game or what else can be added by the modding community.
If you enjoy a little “sit back and watch your masterpiece” run and hope it runs well enough to make money. It’s a very stress-less game so you can relax for the most part. Sometimes you’ll see the money drop and wonder if you’ll lose but hopefully you know what you’re doing right? I hope so. That’s been my personal motto for this game for awhile.
