11-13-2016, 04:23 AM
(11-13-2016, 02:34 AM)Surge Wrote:
"What are you playing Surge?"
Transport Fever
"is it cool? are you going to do a review on it?"
huh what? sorry I was playing Transport Fever.
Oh fine. Transport Fever is what is known as a "German game" which is to say it is a "game" about ruthless industrialism and efficient work habits. Most of which involve trains, buses, and trucks. If the name Transport Fever sounds familiar you may be remembering the "spiritual" predecessor Train Fever, which was released a year or two ago by the same developer, Swiss studio Urban Games, Transport Fever was renamed because it expands the scope from just Trains to also include planes and boats, which only shows that Urban doesn't actually like buses or trucks.
In Transport Fever you assume the role ofomnipotent deityowner of a transportation firm in a randomly generated chunk of world colored to vaguely resemble either Europe or the United States of America. In this role you lay bus stops, roads, tram tracks, railroad tracks, boat docks, airports, train stations, and other odds and ends to facilitate a network of vehicles that shift people and goods alike across the map, you are also occasionally responsible for upgrading municipal roads out of your own pocket because the city is too big and the traffic jams are making life hard for your buses, you guys are welcome for all the business we bring in by the way!
That's not to say that commuter trains and semi trucks from A to B is necessarily all that Transport Fever does, there IS depth to be found here. The game will, initially, start in 1850 and play all the way up to present day (though it never actually ends) and as time progresses, certain prolific trains, trucks, and coaches of the era and region will become available, challenging you to spend money not only to expand the many tendrils of your people shipping monopoly, but also to ride the edge of the latest in people shipping technology, newer vehicles will move faster with more cargo but at a higher price, both upfront and every month, so no those two small hamlets next door to each other don't need a Concord flying between their airports. Towns will also grow as the game progresses and you feed people and goods into their economies, they will almost never grow into a truly sprawling metropolis, but don't be surprised when that temporary train station you plopped down 20 years ago is now surrounded on all sides by fresh shops and houses. Industry is also not necessarily straightforward, to provide goods to your city you must find a goods factory, build a freight station in front of it, find a steel and lumber mill, build freight stations in front of them, and then find a logging site, iron mine, and coal mine and build freight stations in front of them, finally you build a freight station in the town you want to receive goods and buy and assign a bunch of trucks to shuffle all the goods around needed to make this chain of production actually work. That doesn't sound necessarily nightmarish, but wait until you see how the random map generator can create 2/3 of those basic resource sites a reasonable distance from the goods factory, and then only one of the last one you need...on the far corner of the map.
Most of Transport Fever's problems come from an oddly Germano-centric lineup of vehicles (try and find a truck or train car that wasn't built in central Europe, I dare you), that creates a surprisingly sparse list of vehicles in time periods where the industry should have been exploding outwards, and the same old map generator from Train Fever, back before boats or airports were a thing. What this means for maps, is that any body of water with a bridge over it will not be navigable to boats, since the road generator won't elevate the bridge, any good locations for a dock will likely be dramatic slopes that prevent the actual construction of a dock, nevermind roads to link it to a nearby town or industry, and you will basically never be able to find a large enough patch of level ground for a large airport.
All in all Transport Fever is a crazy love letter from some Swiss to everything mass transit, and it's also a pretty neat management game, with an oftentimes clunky but very functional UI, a tangible sense of progression even in the sandbox mode, and a lot of incentive to spend more time studying topographic maps for your current map than actually laying down new tracks.
This sounds like a game that could benefit from a healthy dose of MODDING! to fix a few issues and expand on what is already there.
Am I right in guessing it plays somewhat similar to (in a vague and generalized sense) to sim city? The concept seems pretty cool, and i especially like the idea of the time progression.