Transport Fever 4+

If you loved Transport Tycoon on the PC decades ago, you’ll love this.
It offers better 3D graphics, more realistic road and track layouts (no more absurd 45º turn) and allows you to get a driver’s eye view from any vehicle.

However there are many annoyances that still need to be ironed out, so I can’t give it 5 stars yet.

* There is no overview map, and zooming fully out slows the game unacceptably (I’ve even resorted to drawing a map on a piece of paper!) It plays fine when zoomed in, so clearly it is trying to process some things unnecessarily when zoomed out.
* Building train sheds is unnecessarily tedious — it should be possible to semi-automatically build them parallel to tracks, complete with points.
* The mechanism of the signalling system is unclear, and causes trains to get stuck endlessly. Trying to make a double track with one way each side, just makes trains get stuck. They don’t seem to have the gumption to free themsleves. Putting one train on one track works fine, or a simple one-way loop, but that isn’t always what you realistically want to do.
* The cargo chains, whilst good in theory, are often impossible to fathom out and very frustrating as it is often not clear why things to do not happen. The game offers warning messages for some problems, but for cargo chain problems some of them are misleading. Stuck trains do not get reported and you only spot them by noticing loss of profit on that line.
* Track building is often frustrating, with sily little error mesages coming up without clear explanation as to what the problem is. Flat land is often essential for complex rail junctions but you cannot easily see where it is.
* The instructions are somewhat limited, with much to learn that is not made clear from the start, so you have to end up wading through forums to try and figure things out.

Whilst there are many issues that will doubtless be improved; there is still much fun to be had as long as you accept these imitations for now.
Mods and maps can be created, so there is much for the enthusiast to work on, whilst the dev are ironing out the game play issues.

As long as you don’t expect everything to work perfectly yet (it is after all trying to model complex real world transportation systems) you can still build a great train set…

Just superb. Navigation around the ‘world’ is easy and locating routes, stops and individual vehicles on routes is generally just a click or 2 away, as is viewing financial performance at a company, route and vehicle level.

There are a few tweaks that would make it easier at a micromanagement level, such as the ability to assign more than 1 cargo type to a vehicle (without setting it to automatic where anything is carried).This would enable delivery of a required cargo to a farm/plant etc. and the collection of the produced product for onward delivery to a town e.g. This would avoid vehicles runnng empty of cargo on a return leg.(Setting the ‘carry anything’ option sometimes results in unwanted goods being collected and delivered to a subsequent stop for no income).

One big requirement for me is seeing the lifetime and last year profit at route (line) level. A Balance figure for the current year is shown on the Line screen but it only seems to be accurate at the end of the year and completely random at other times. In other words, the total profit of all the individual vehicles assigned to a route for the current year does not equate to the route (line) balance except around December time.

Finally, two requests for support were answered by email the same day.

Highly recommended if you like this genre of games.

If you're looking to get absorbed completely in a transport logistics game, look no further. This is the yardstick by which others should be judged. It has its problems - the tutorial is inadequate and does not teach you everything, some of the scenarios are FIENDISHLY difficult to the point of nervous breakdown, some slight juddering in the graphics occasionally - but who said life was a rose garden? You'll be hooked within minutes.