You done fucked it up! As AJ would say it

This game was supposed to be the holy grail for Transport Tycoon Deluxe fans. And it's almost great, but they faceplanted right at the threshold of greatness and badly. The game is 90% well designed, but that remaining 10% makes the whole experience frustrating and infuriating at times. Instead of satisfying and soothing as Transport Tycoon was.

The developers made a few inexplicable design choices, that make some aspects of the game really frustrating and trial / error style. And when questioned they keep deflecting by saying "this is not transport tycoon, it's not supposed to work like that". But the problem is that it works in arbitrary incomprehensible ways.

By far the worst offender is the cargo handling engine of the game. That works fine if you keep things simple, one origin, one destination, haul cargo, end of story. The problems start when you try to set up lines more complex than a nail. Like multiple cargo types, or different cargo destinations with one origin point, and the mix of those. Since everything is handled fully automatically. You can't tell the game which cargo to transport where, you're entirely at the mercy of the engine. And as I said for simple things it will work, for anything complex cargo starts to turn up at the most unexpected places, where it absolutely doesn't belong.

Like you have a docks, where you drop off say stone and iron ore. You want to transport stone to the construction material plant, and iron ore to the steel mill. That's two lines, no problem whatsoever. But steel mills have a by-product called slag, that's also needs to be taken to the construction materials plant. Now try to set up a line between the steel mill and the plant, and things go haywire very fast. iron ore will end up being transported to the materials plant, and dropped off there for no reason whatsoever, slag will end up at the docks, because the game tries to use connecting routes to transport cargo. And you end up with a big mess on your hands. Because the trucks you intended to transport stone from the docks to the plant, will instead be tied down transporting slag that is not even supposed to be there.

It's a complete and utter mess. With no manual overrides. The only control you have is by locking vehicles in to one cargo type. But then you completely cut yourself off from the option of transporting a different cargo on the way back. Your vehicles will be empty half the time which is no good for profit.
And the automation problem extends to routing as well. You have no control over which road vehicles should take, and the game always chooses the shortest route and not the fastest one. So building relief roads won't do much good.

And that's not even all. There is no overtaking of vehicles in the game. And not just on road, Transport Tycoon had that feature in 1995, but let's gloss over that. Even fucking ships can't overtake each other. So if I put a regular ship capable of 25kmh on the same line as a hovercraft capable of 100kmh the hovercraft won't for the love of anything holy overtake the slow moving regular ship. OMFG,
This means you can't mix different vehicles using the same route segments, because they'd end up going with the speed of the slowest vehicle on the line anyway.

It's ridiculous. You have to use the same vehicles for all your lines that have overlapping segments, so they don't get bogged down by each other.

And road vehicle depos are a mess as well. You can't use full load for any line, because they get blocked immediately, and the large depo is not much better either. The only difference between the small and the large one is that the large has 3 loading bays instead of 2. But that too will be blocked very fast by just one vehicle set to full load.

And there is also a problem with trains. One line will only ever use one platform at a station. You can't have two trains assigned to the same line drop off cargo at different platforms. Even trough the station has 3 empty platforms, the trains will wait at the entrance until the previous one have left the station. So no highly efficient cargo hubs, like in TTD.

And to not go without mentioning planes, they are utterly and totally useless. Illogical, and inefficient. For example taking off planes have priority over landing planes on runways!!!! So if your plane tries to land and it's two feet from the tarmac, it will still get overridden by the plane trying to take off. Sending it off into a ridiculously long and time consuming circle to try again landing later. So you can end up with some of the planes just circling for months or even years without landing.

And newer planes have absolutely no benefit to buy, they have too little capacity and they are too expensive. It's ridiculous that the plane with the highest capacity is the Concorde up until the nineties. When they finally add a plane with higher capacity than that. Speed is completely irrelevant in the game anyway, because all planes manoeuvre around 200-300kmh, and almost never reach their top speed within the game area, since it's too small for air travel to be effective. This means the DC4 constellation developed in the fifties is the best and most efficient plane to use while it's available, up until the eighties. This aspect of the game is the least balanced and therefore most useless.

Let's have a few words about the campaigns. At least they made an effort on it, but it also has aspects that drives you mad. Like introducing an arbitrary scale measuring willingness to travel, which you supposed to raise somehow, but you don't know what affects it and how. The game only has 14 missions divided into two 7 mission campaigns "Europe" and "America". The missions within each campaign are completely stand alone, there is no connection between any of them. Even the difficulty of missions is random, you can't feel a linear ramp. Some of them are fun, some of them are frustrating. Mostly in the European side. The American campaign seems much better.

Construction is a bit wonky too. But it can be managed. If you try to build a depot or any station directly connected to a street, it will cost 2-3 times more, than if you simply build it without street connection then connect the street manually. Road and rail construction must be micromanaged segment by segment otherwise it will cost astronomical amounts. Sometimes the game will refuse to do some construction unless you remove the already existing rail and start from scratch. And the landscaping tools are totally useless. You can only manipulate land using concentric circles, It's like the smoother tool in photoshop, you can't make concrete adjustments just trying to smudge things over, but it's time consuming, and the end result always looks like crap, and totally unrealistic.
The game sometimes puts huge slope changes into roads and rails too. With roads it's not that big of a problem, but it looks ridiculous when a train goes over such a slope change.

Also there doesn't seem to be much willingness from the devs. to improve the questionable aspects of the game. They released a stability patch for the game a few days after release, but since then all quiet on the western front. And that was almost month ago. At least they should issue a statement "We know about the shortcomings, we're working on it" But this silence makes me feel like they have taken the money and ran.




+

  • Graphics
  • Passenger traffic handling  
  • Some fun missions  
  • Ability to sell all vehicles on a line with one click  


-

  • Annoyance and frustration due to automated cargo handling.  
  • Routing
  • Single platform for one line  
  • No overtaking for any vehicle land or water  
  • arbitrary metrics you should somehow appease  
  • No manual overrides  
  • Wonky construction refusing to build some things
  • Ugly and unrealistic landscaping  
  • Too few vehicle types, no alternatives to choose from.  
  • Trains are too expensive, often a railcar costs more than the locomotive  
  • Double heading trains doesn't seem to make any difference apart from doubling running costs  
  • Construction is allowed while paused, so you can basically build up your whole infrastructure within a day  
  • Air travel is an useless gimmick  
  • Using full load will most certainly block the cargo hub, due to fluctuating cargo avaialibilty  
  • Unexplainable strange behaviour of passengers using strange routes to get to their destination, or not using your routes at all at times. And bsinesses not releasing cargo while demanding that you transport more.  
  • Cargo locked in to destinations, there is no reallocation based on demand changes during transit.  
  • Supply never matches demand, meaning the facility only taking 10 units / year will be allocated 100 or 1000 while the facility demanding 800 will be allocated much less.
  • Upgrading just one station / depo / bus stop connected to a line, will erase all cargo / passengers waiting on that line at any station trough the entire line.  



graphics/realization: 7/10
story/atmosphere: N/A
gameplay/controls: 3/10

overall: 4/10