This game is the perfect dream for train model builders. It’s a game where you have to build out your railway empire. Compare it to Railroad Tycoon. Although this game doesn’t limit itself to trains. You can even make highways, waterways and every kind of travel infrastructure you can imagine.
The game opens with some bar music. Don’t really know what to call it. But as soon as you start up the game, you can’t help to feel the western theme that this game is drowning in.
Anyway this game has the standard game modes. You have tutorial, campaign and free mode. These game modes speak for themselves.
The tutorial teaches you all you need to know. The only thing I don’t like about the tutorial is that it sometimes is a bit hard to follow. By this I mean that you sometimes don’t know what you are supposed to do. For instance you have to put things in a red and a green zone. They are far apart from each other so you zoom out. Problem is that those zones disappear when you zoom out.
The main premise of the game is to connect all the towns and make money. You have all these little towns with a few roads in them. But no road is connecting them and this is where you come along. You can start by making streets connecting the towns. But you can also make railways, water routes and you can even go through air. Yes you can make an airport to connect towns. You can even help the local economy by making freight trains that deliver goods.
Also a shout out to the voice actor that accompanies you in the tutorials and the game in general. His voice is in my opinion really reassuring. He has a voice that perfectly accompanies the “western” theme. Because you just can’t help to feel like you are in the Wild West even though you are in Western Europe. I like this thing in games where they actually use real locations. In Transport Fever you can be in Germany, England or California. Or at least those were the locations I was put in.
This reminds me of the ability that you can choose your continent. You can go to the “Wild West” too! If you choose free game or campaign you can choose between Europe and America. You can even choose what era you are playing in. The earliest you could play was 1850. Which was about the time that trains actually got proper speeds.
At this point I was looking at Wikipedia, looking at the milestones of train development. And I actually saw some trains that are in the game. Like the flying Scotsman for instance.
Another nice addition to this game is the Steam workshop. You can download all kinds of train wagons or busses. And I guess this is perfect for the train fanatics.
This game is really nice! When I first started the game there was a little problem though. The game keeps starting up in Russian. Don’t know wat is doing that. But it is easy to fix on steam. This game is no innovator though. It is a typical tycoon game. But that is just the good thing about it. You know what you can expect. It doesn’t create hype or anything but we have all played at least one tycoon game so we know what to expect from these kind of games. Maybe in these times of uncertainty (*cough* Trump *cough*) we want to find ourself in things we are sure about. It’s not really that rewarding though. Maybe it is my personal opinion but it is not the kind of game where I will spend hours on personally. It is nice though to imagine you are sitting in that train strolling through the fantastic scenery. If you happen to be a (model) train fanatic then you will probably have a blast with this game and eventually be able to spend the many hours of gameplay it offers!
