Transport Fever 3 Review — The Next Stop on the Road to the Perfect Strategy Game

Fans of transport strategy games surely know that the Transport Fever series began with Train Fever, released by Swiss studio Urban Games in 2012 and funded by the community through crowdfunding. The game didn't become a hit, but it gained popularity among lovers of trains and transport logistics — building roads and creating supply chains between cities.

Train Fever was followed first by Transport Fever and then by Transport Fever 2, and each time, before releasing a new game, the developers emphasized that when fixing shortcomings and improving gameplay, they were guided primarily by players' opinions. They repeated this point shortly before the release of Transport Fever 3, also promising that the game would be bigger and deeper than its predecessors while keeping the series' signature features.

Let's see whether the developers managed to keep their promises and how they handled fixing their mistakes this time. Those seeing passengers off, please leave the cars — we're departing!

Let me remind you of the main features of Transport Fever that set the series apart from other economic simulators and city-building strategies.

In Transport Fever, you can't build cities — they grow on their own, while the player focuses on organizing transport between settlements and industries. Townspeople have starting needs, for example, for wood and fish, and the player's task is to set up deliveries of the required resources to the city. With a high level of happiness, the city grows, creating new needs that must be met through logistics chains.

In the main Tycoon mode, the game gives the player a few simple starting tasks and then lets them go free. There is no final goal in the game — this is another signature feature of the series. Story missions exist only in the campaign mode, made up of eight tutorial missions that take the player through different locations spanning the years 1900 to 2033.

The main thing in Transport Fever 3 is, of course, transport and roads. Trains, cars and ships are now joined by helicopters, cargo trams and light rail — the game now has more than 300 types of meticulously recreated vehicles. As in previous installments, the game strives to show the evolution of technology: at first you only have steam locomotives, later you can replace them with diesel locomotives, and then with modern electric ones. All in all, it's a real amusement park for fans of railways and other machinery.

Cities and industries on the map now generate side quests (connect two cities by rail, transport raw materials, etc.), which promise big profits if completed, but failure results in equally big losses. The developers also added new industries and updated the built-in mod editor — mod support is available from day one. If only there were multiplayer too… but no, there's no talk of it yet.

Among the smaller innovations, there's a dynamic day-night cycle, as well as the ability to build landmarks that, as in Cities: Skylines, give bonuses to cities and industries.

In pre-release interviews, the developers emphasized that they wanted to make Transport Fever 3 deeper, add large-scale economic challenges and thereby turn it into an economic tycoon game. What did they do to achieve this?

Vehicles now have a wear mechanic: the player needs to build maintenance buildings, within whose range vehicles won't break down. If you don't keep an eye on wear, vehicles slow down and may break down right on the route. Passengers have a waiting limit: if they have to wait too long for transport, they won't stand at the stop forever and will leave.

Cargo transport now takes into account not only distance but also time: perishable goods need to be delivered on time, while coal or stone can be assigned slower transport. Also, following the example of Cities: Skylines, the developers let players manually configure traffic: place traffic lights, ban or allow turns and lane usage.

Finally, city development has been made more lively: cities don't grow evenly in all directions, but dynamically, depending on which zone — residential, commercial or industrial — is developing fastest. Industries can now be "boosted": if you supply, for example, a drilling site with tools and labor, its productivity will increase significantly.

Most economic strategy games are extremely clear and engaging during the first 1–2 hours. But later, as the number of routes grows, income and expenses turn into five-digit figures, and the number of vehicles approaches a hundred, control over the game's logic and processes is often lost. The player no longer understands where certain numbers come from, why a route suddenly stopped being profitable, and what algorithms the game runs on in general. Unfortunately, Transport Fever 3 is no exception in this respect.

The series has always been criticized for its "esoteric logistics" — hidden and sometimes non-obvious internal rules that make the player shout at the screen: "What's wrong?! Why isn't this working?!" In Transport Fever 3, this problem was supposed to be solved by notifications the game sends if, for example, a train can't continue moving for some reason. But you'll have to look for the causes manually. Is a signal missing? Are the tracks unfinished? While you're looking for the cause, the train may start moving on its own, leaving you puzzled. The same goes for income figures: they jump sharply one moment and suddenly collapse the next, keeping the budget under control is extremely difficult, since you have to operate with six-digit numbers. To say that you've fully figured out the game, you'll either have to get out a calculator and recalculate all the numbers, or give up and trust to luck.

The artificial intelligence that determines the behavior of vehicles and NPCs hasn't gotten any smarter either. For example, you connect three toilets with one sewage truck route (there are missions like that in the game too). The truck, having filled its tank to the brim after visiting the first two toilets, will still drive to the third one, wasting money on upkeep, instead of heading straight to the treatment plant.

There are also plenty of strange gameplay decisions: for example, the game somehow allows cargo to be unloaded at bus stops. There's no instant repair button: instead of repairs, the game offers to replace the vehicle with a new one.

More than two years ago, a fan of the Transport Fever series left the following message on Reddit: "I know we all want Transport Fever 3 — me included. I'd like to see dynamic weather, changing seasons and time of day, bigger maps, deeper mechanics, big and bustling cities — and so on and so forth."

One might think the developers framed these thoughts and regularly checked against them during development, but they couldn't come up with anything fundamentally new. Transport Fever 3 is a solid representative of the niche genre of transport strategy games, it really is bigger than its predecessor and deeper in many respects. However, the step forward the game has taken is much smaller than players expected. Fans of the genre will spend dozens of hours in Transport Fever 3, but other players — only dozens of minutes.