Train Fever

An interesting and very detailed simulation of transportation, that shows attention to detail by the developers. The lack of a handbook or even tooltips can result in quite a steep learning curve, with lot's of trial, error and wasted funds. It is hard to gauge if there is enough room for the track constructs you need and there is lot's of detail work needed to setup the tracks properly so that multiple trains can use them in quick sucession/concurrently. It is also hard to gauge if you busses can make a U-turn or have to drive a detour to turn around. But since it is aiming for a long playtime, that should not be much of an issue in the long run and for the overall experience. I cannot confirm reports of others that the game is "badly optimised". It runs fluidly on my I5 notebook with Windows 8.1, even at highest simulation speeds.

One warning ahead: This game needs some horsepower in your PC. It's custom 3D engine definitely needs some optimization, especially on notebooks. That being sad: On my i5-4570 linux desktop with 8gb ram and an NVIDIA gtx 750, it runs smooth and looks really good :-). It's unfornutate that many simulation fans run older PCs but if you happen to like such games and have a newer PC, you should try this game. It has a step learning curve and i played it for hours and hours and i have to control myself each time not to lose days to this game. I has some rough edges though, but the devs are very passionate and a lot has been fixed already and they continue to deliver on gameplay improvements.

This is a guessing game. They don't actually, like, tell you the rules or how the game works or ... anything. The "tutorial" consists of maybe the equivalent of a page or two of text that gives you the barest clues to how to get started. The game here is not to build a railroad, but to figure out what the rules are by trial and error. You'll discover pretty quickly that if you're going to have trains running in two directions on a single line, you need to build sidings and signals. Ok, fine. if you know anything about railroads you might have guessed that. But how do you build sidings? Where do signals go? There's something called "waypoints". Not a clue what these are for or how they work. How do I know what goods anyone will ship? I set up a route delivering oil to an oil refinery and that worked fine. Then I saw there are "iron mines", and if you hunt around a little you will discover that "steel mills" want iron and coal. So I built a station near an iron mine and another near a steel mill and ran a train between them. They never shipped any iron on the train. Okay, maybe I need to have both iron and coal available before they'll ship either. So I set up another route to bring coal. Still nothing. Was the station too far from the iron mine? Was the other station too far from the steel mill? Was there some other problem? Not a clue. I don't like games where I have to reverse engineer the game to figure out the rules. Okay, in real life, maybe owners of a railroad wouldn't know exactly how many passengers would ride their trains, etc. But surely they'd have a clue, especially when considering transporting raw materials to a factory. Like, before spending millions of dollars building stations and laying track and buying trains, wouldn't they talk to the factory owner and ask, "Hey, if we ran a rail line in here to deliver coal, would you use it?" But there's no way to ask. You have to build the rail line and see what happens.

Sounds like a transport tycoon dream. but optimisation, controls and some game mechanics are pulling this down. Will be happy reviewing this if devs make some necessary updates.