Make no mistake about it, Transport Fever 3 requires a strategic mindset. If you’re a big picture thinker who can keep an eye on multiple systems and processes occurring simultaneously then you’ll get a real kick out of seeing your settlements grow. If, like me, you’re more of a “lol I like trains” gamer then you may struggle a bit, but that doesn’t change the fact that Transport Fever 3 is a great game and when you successfully get everything flowing together you feel like a genius, it’s just a shame that when things go wrong it’s not always clear why.
Transport Fever 3 is a tycoon game built around developing transport networks for both people and cargo in order to link settlements with vital resources so they can grow. It might look a bit like Cities: Skylines at times, but you’re not here to build towns from scratch. They exist on the map already and it’s up to you to find and optimise the best routes for them to grow in size. You’ll be building road and rail networks, setting up supply chains, managing fleets upon fleets of vehicles and conquering sky and sea with planes and boats too. There really is a huge amount to get your head around in this game, which is why the campaign is the best place to start.
It introduces you to the core mechanics through a globe-trotting series of 8 missions set in a range of time periods. You start in 1906 New Orleans and finish in 2033 Japan, but along the way you’ll be visiting Italy, Australia, Norway and more. There’s some good variety here and it does a fine job of teaching you not just the mechanics but how to think. For example, a mission in the desert sees you dealing with additional wear and tear on your fleet of trucks due to the harsh conditions, so you need to start thinking about how you can chain together supply lines to get the right materials to your destination, and once you start thinking like this you see potential everywhere.
There’s obviously not much in the way of a story, but each mission has a scenario for you to get stuck into. In New Orleans you meet mayor Beauregard Fontaine, who sounds like Foghorn Leghorn, and work with him to bring Mardi Gras to the city. My favourite was set in the 60s at Woodstock where you help turn a small hippy camp into a bustling community by delivering food and aid to the people there while learning about hauling waste too. There are some fun references to legally distinct versions of music legends while a soft version of “All The Leaves Are Brown” plays in the background, and it was a good way to spend an hour or so.
Whether you’re in the campaign or playing in free mode, you’ll spend a huge amount of time dipping in and out of menus, overseeing your vehicles and keeping an eye on meters and icons to make sure things are growing and not going wrong. Supply lines need setting up, and while it’s easy to create them, refining and using them often feels a bit clunky. You’re constantly switching between interacting with things in the game world and moving between sections or sub-sections of a menu, and while the team have done a genuinely impressive job with the controls, it doesn’t change the fact this is clearly better suited to a PC.
I regularly found my fingers falling over themselves while I tried to remember the quickest way to assign vehicles to supply lines, or edit the cargo I wanted specific vehicles to collect. When you get it right you feel like a master, but those moments were few and far between for me. As alluded to at the start of the game though, I think this will quickly become second nature for the right type of player.
One other source of annoyance for me was that sometimes stuff would just stop working and I wouldn’t know why. Trucks would stop at the supply line I’d set up but wouldn’t collect anything before they set off to their next stop. Deleting and redoing the line didn’t help, and the game’s (usually quite helpful) notification system didn’t ping me telling me I’d done something wrong so I was a bit flummoxed. This happened a few times in some of the missions, and each time I found it frustrating as I knew there’d be an answer but I just couldn’t work out what it was.
There’s something deeply satisfying about gazing down at your network of trucks and trains and seeing them work in harmony. I love being able to zoom right in and see this action at ground level too, and you have camera options to see things from the perspective of your fleet. Transport Fever 3 is quite a pretty game, and even with a huge amount happening at any one time, it still looked great up close as it does from above.
It’s not without issue though, and there are some quite glaring performance hitches on PS5, with significant framerate drops that feel beyond what we typically think of as acceptable. There’s a quality and a performance mode, and normally I’d opt for the higher framerate but it was so unstable that in the end I used quality mode so that it’d at least be somewhat stable.
Transport Fever 3 is a great game when you’ve got the right mindset for it. Even with my tired old brain I was still able to appreciate the huge level of depth and customisation it has, and the potential to really stretch your strategic muscles. There are a few annoyances, particularly around controls and interface, but this is a game I’ll be dipping in and out of for the rest of the year.
