This game... It has it ups and down, dont get me wrong i do enjoy it alot somtimes.

Pros:
Good gameplay
Immersive sounds.

Cons:
Performance
Price
No Multiplayer
Limited amount of Road vehicles.
Limited amount of content, only a western europe and usa setting.

Overall for the price wait for it to go on sale for 10-15$ for that price i would recomend this game since its content then fits the value. Cheers!

After more than 146 hours of play, I'm still enjoying this game. And what's more: this game is still being updated and improved by the developers on an almost weekly basis. I'm not just talking about numerous performance updates, but also improvements on the game itself, many of which came from the Train Fever community.

I think that you'll find the game much more playable and responsive than in September. By far most performance issues have been fixed and many smaller and larger additions to the game have made it so it's still fun to play even after 140 hours.

Meanwhile, there is an active mod community that has made it possible to add many dozens of cool new trains and train cars to the game for free and edit it in just about any other way you might want, such as a winter mode, new industries, an updated UI, cool new train stations, and much more. (Click here for a guide on installing mods in TF.)

And finally: this month, a new USA-themed DLC will be released for Train Fever by the developers FOR FREE, which will include 50+ new trains and new American landscapes. I'm going to echo my comment from September here: Seriously, if you like transport sims, GET THIS GAME. You will not regret it.

Original review below

(I'm a beta tester. A few screenshots of the game are at the end of my review.) (Click here for a Beginner's Guide to Train Fever)

If you even remotely like sim games like Cities in Motion, Railroad Tycoon, Transport Tycoon, or even Sim City, you will absolutely love Train Fever. (And if you loved those games, Train Fever will probably ruin your social life... but that's a good thing, in this case.)

In this game, you get to build a transport empire with buses, trucks, and trains. The maps are huge (even the smallest map size will give you 20+ hours of gameplay) and the graphics are beautiful.

You can build rail lines, bus lines, and cargo lines at will and connect the many towns and industries to each other. If you do it right, the towns will grow into cities and the industries will up their production - which of course leads to more passengers and goods to transport.

There is always something going on; new vehicles are introduced regularly and the needs of towns, cities, and industries change and evolve as time progresses. You start your game in 1850, when only a few steam trains are available, but by 1950 you will have seen a huge selection of trains (including electric and diesel trains), as well as many different cargo trucks, cars, and buses. None of them will last forever, so make sure to replace them with a newer model when they get old!

You can also follow all trains, buses, trucks, and even individual passengers up close if you want, so if you feel like enjoying the scenery (and it is absolutely beautiful to watch), just ride along with your trains. Every person in the game has a set house, a set job, a place they like to shop and a place they work, and you can follow them around if you like. Whether they take your transportation or (from about 1900 on) their own car, depends completely on you.

So much potential fell so short, I used to love railroad tycoon and although this is similar in concept its a really terrible game. The graphic assets look promising, but the game play has disappointed me in several respects. The Ai is awful and things eventually get clogged. Once you get to any level of complexity with sets of intersections and switches, the trains just do the stupidest things and even though your tracks make sense the trains get backed up behind each other instead of taking reasonable routes. The interface is awkward to use. You can't modify gameplay while in game. The rotations of the terrain via the mouse are counter-intuitive. The game constantly lurches every minute or so while it seems to do a mass calculation which constantly gives you a feeling of discontinuity. I'd love to take the assets from the game and build something that's actually fun to play. Train Fever just annoys me.

good time playing , needs patience to understand the UI, choppy after 1H, need a save and restart. mechanics of the game are a bit different than others gamres of this kind, here you must build the demand, before you ramp up production. Typically you must take care of the cities, grow them before you cam really develop and expand.
I recommend to buy with special discount, I had the game for 7.99. good deal for 50+ hours of playtime.

Promising game.... though its incomplete and it looks like the developers address new DLC in favour of fixing the game itself. This game is in a state of "Early Access", i wouldn't even call it beta maybe a pre-beta.
Nice graphics and music. But that's not enough for a good game.
TF lacks an intuitive interface and track building is a real pain in the a**. I could live with that, but the annoyance just starts there. You may start with 1 track and one train between 2 stations. Now look into the future, you may want to extend your station - bad idea, you'll have to burn the old one down to the ground and replace it with a complete new one and even that one is limited to 5 tracks.... sorry guys that's an insult for every transport tycoon!
Then there is that .... AI ... no, its more a very simple script that tells the train where to go. If you have more than one track at a station, the trains of a line (the list of stations to approach) will ALWAYS use the same track.... even when the others are unoccupied and more trains of the same line form a queue behind the first waiting train.... and other trains of other lines aswell.
In other words: Its too difficult for casual players (interface/track building) and lacks very basic features for the expert players coming from OpenTTD or Railroad Tycoon.
But hey, it's in real 3D and it looks good.....
I am very disappointed and do not recommend this game.

Date of writing this review: 20/10/14. Some of my criticisms may have been addressed by the time you are reading this.

Firstly, I would like to state that I got this game 2 days ago, and I already have 16 hours. In my opinion, the game is the best tycoon game since Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

However, there are a few negatives that I would like to address, and because of these few negatives, people are not enjoying the game, or buying it.

- Dumb Name. Why didn't they call it Transport Fever!?! Would have made much more sense as the game is not only about building train lines.

- Minimal Tutorial. Despite this game being a very complex game, the tutorial is almost laughable. However, there are several community made tutorials to which aided me in learning the game, my favourite one being this one

- Rail Building could do some work. In order to build railway, you must do it in several chunks. This is as the game tries to average out the terrain, so that the rail will not go on a gradient - which can cost an absurd amount of money if the rail goes for too long.

- No Airports, or Boats. The airports I can somewhat understand, however the boats I do not. Each map has a river along it. It is crazy to think that despite this, they didn't put in a chance to add boat lines! I do hope that they add these features into a future update, or even a DLC.

- Only 4 Resources. I understand that with this, they were trying to go for the simplistic approach so that the learning curve isn't to big, however at least give me a chance in a settings menu to have more. The game does have excellent modding support though, and so I am sure that people will make mods in order to address this issue.


Once you look over these issues, it can be seen that the game is amazing. All up I am going to give this game an 8/10, and would still reccomend you to buy it, despite these issues. Also, if they do fix up these key issues, it could easily be a 10/10. Enjoy the game, and should you have any further questions regarding the game, feel free to add me and ask me some questions!

(This is my first proper review, so could you leave me some feedback? Thanks guys!)

When this game first came out it was a little buggy, and people expected huge things from a developers début title. Which is a silly thing to do for any new developer. (I blame the amazing trailer)


- You can't build wildly inaccurate track as you can in most games, the track has to be quite straight and realistic causing most initial plans that you would try to reuse from other games like TT and RT to be thrown out almost instantly and real planning to come in.
- It's quite easy to suddenly turn from profit to loss and loss to profit depending on how badly you have planned that upgrade.
- The nice looks means you get that enjoyable feeling watching trains whiz past the camera at multiple angles.

- The micro management is nothing amazing compared to other titles and possibly a little bit simple, but when you consider that it's a début title and they are not asking for €60 it's not bad.
- Simple, but long game. The game is quite simplistic so don't expect it to be a challenging, it's more relaxing than challenging. Once you've figured out the game there is very little to do other than just keep expanding and improving efficiency; It doesn't detract from the game-play, just don't expect things to change with every new game.

- The game is pretty simple, and easy to win once you figure out what it's people want. As much as to be expected with a début title.
- Town and resource placement is almost equidistant resulting in the same planning working for every map, and every town. So after you have a working strategy it will never fail, which negates it's replay value.
- No random events. If you've put a line down that makes a profit, it will continue to do so unless you change something.
- No AI companies. It gets lonely with no competition.
- The collision detection in this game is quite poor and lack of certain types of junction and crossroad make some types of planning impossible.


This may not be an amazing AAA game, but compared to what else is available it's okay. The graphics certainly make up for the lack of content in the game, and if you are into modding, (which is rather easy by the way) you can add plenty of additional content.
Even though this game is quite simple and doesn't contain much content, the developers continuously upgraded and improved the game around it's fans, and as such the features it does have are quite enjoyable.

There isn't much replay capability once you've found the most efficient engine, and built all the lines. The map generator is rather simple, and although new maps are initially a challenge. Once you've built a profitable company with a dozen lines, the rest of the map loses it's importance other than just to "connect everything". An AI opponent would be all it would have needed to keep the momentum going.

I'd recommend this to anyone that liked games like Railroad Tycoon or Transport Tycoon, but never really got into the heavy micro management or accounting side of things. If you just want to play with some trains, this is a good game for you.

The transport tycoon genre isn't the most popular genre, and in the last years we've not seen many new ones pop out. There's been some, but most of them haven't cut it. The last still good transport tycoon is OpenTTD, which is well over 15 years old, so that says a lot. Is Train Fever the true next succedor or just another failed attempt to recreate the true glory of the classic transport tycoon?

First of all, Train Fever looks gorgeous. It is by far the best looking transport tycoon that exists. Every part of the graphics is very well done, and the world looks beautiful (albeit a bit empty at times). Everything from the rail tracks to trains and buses to cities, they are all carefully crafted and you can truly enjoy the result. The game is almost hypnotizing, and I find myself spending a lot of time just following the small trains around, moving through the landscape and the result of my hard work as a rail entrepenour.

Now, graphics is only one thing, more importantly is the gameplay. To coorelate to the graphic part, the game is very dynamic. Cities will over time grow and change visual appearance. Building style will change to fit the current era, and the pedestrians in the streets. Vehicles get new replacements, and the stations and bus stops change appearance as well. Cities will grow when you supply it with passenger services and goods, or simply create a local bus route in the city. When the city grows it's also an indicator of you most likely earning money as well. The cities grow dynamically, adjusting to the terrain, so no two cities grow in the same way, resulting in relatively diverse cities spreading across the map.

A key thing in the game is that every person is a simulated entity, with a home, workplace and destination. Unlike older games, simply attaching a station to a city won't do anything in itself, you need to connect the cities people actually want to travel to. This means that a station with for example a 100 passengers, a train approaching won't necessarily take all of them despite having space. You can luckily easily see where they're heading by simply clicking the station, and it gives you an overview over what lines the passengers are waiting for. Of those 100 passengers, 50 of them could be for one train line, 40 for another, and 10 for the local bus.

Passengers are despite this relatively easy to manage. It's recommended to start with internal bus/tram routes, then connect cities with buses. After time, the demand will be high enough for you to use trains, effectively being able to connect several cities in one route. Now, cargo is something else however. Cargo in Train Fever is very tricky to wrap your head around. It's heavily based around demand. If a city has demand for goods, the factories will produce exactly as much as is demanded, if they have the resources supplied for it. It never produces more. A single factory can have a production up to 400 (which is quite a lot), supplied with only one of each sub resource source (a steel mill for example requires iron ore and coal, but only one factory of each), as production scales with it. The most efficient way to deal with cargo is by using trucks, as they are frequent and cost efficient, easily allowing you to see if a route is profitable or not.

Now, a key element in Train Fever is the upkeep. Unlike other transport tycoons, laying roads and tracks is cheap. Very cheap. Trucks and buses have moderate upkeep (it's pretty reasonable, and will usually end up in profit), while trains have HUGE upkeep. The upkeep scales over time, an old train has signficiantly higher upkeep, forcing you to replace engines often. This however is quite easy, as you can allocate automatic replacement of a line in your route planner.
As time passes, new, more powerful engines will be able, but they will also be more expensive. This approach forces you to have efficient and profitable train routes. A train route can either have million losses or million profits, depending on how well managed it is. I've found that a good approach is to have double track passenger lines with 3-5 stops, with two running trains. As long as you don't overextend your passenger trains, they will be fine (you don't need too many wagons or the fanciest engines).
Cargo trains are a whole different story, and something I struggle with heavily. If I start early on building one, I can get a line with 3 stops to profit, with roughly 150-200 cargo being transported. Establishing a new route in modern times turns out to be harder. If you can managge it right, it will give a decent profit, but in the end it just isn't worth the hazzle. With passenger trains you can easily set up a route with 5+ million in profit, and you can make several of them.

Another thing in Train Fever is transport time. A person or cargo will in total time spend no more than 20 in-game minutes, including walking to the station and switching lines. This means that long cargo lines have limited efficiency, and that passenger routes cannot be too long. Roughly 10 minutes for trains is decent, and a minute for buses. Trucks can go down to 10 seconds on busy routes. This system works hand in hand with the passenger entity system. If a route takes longer than 20 minutes in total, the person will use their car or simply not go (as far as I know).

I believe that's most of the game's elements that's worth mentioning.
The game has a good modding community, and I recommend picking up some mods as it can extend the fun of the game heavily.

Verdict!

Pros:
- Gorgeous looking
- Realistic and satisfying simulation
- Fun to play
- Easy to manage with a good UI
- Challenging
- Easy to mod

Cons:
- Cargo system is simply annoying
- The economy isn't satisfactory for some
- No planes or ships
- Steep learning curve (this can be seen as both good and bad, but I feel many will feel it's on the bad side)
- Can feel repetitive after a while

To conclude:
Train Fever is definitely worth playing if you like transport tycoons. It looks beautiful, and it feels a bit like managing a model railway. It's fun, and gives for many, many hours of gameplay. It takes time to learn, but as you eventually get to know your ways around it you'll feel a sense of achievement. It's challenging, but in a fun way. The stock selection is a bit sparse, but a few mods will change that. The cargo system is ridiculously hard to manage.
In overall, a very good game, but I'm usure as to whether people will accept it as a "true" succedor to previous installments. Personally I won't ever touch any of the old games again.

Score: 8/10
"like skyrim but with trains"

This game sadly feels like an early access, the game works but a lot of stuff are missing and it makes it really unbearable after a while.
I wonder sometimes if the dev played any other games like Transport Tycoon Deluxe, Railroad Tycoon or Cities in Motions 2 and if they even played their game !

+ The scale : big map, big stations, long trains, big cities
+ The simulation : cities grow with your changes, each cargo/passenger is simulated, cities got residential, commercial, industrial and leisure buildings.
+ Good building options
+ It's 3D, not particularly pretty but still nice though a bit empty and green.
+ Mod support (hopefully)

- Poor performance
- The UI is appalling
- Lots of options are missing (key bindings, UI scale, mouse speed, etc)
- A line will always use the same path and platform so 2 trains from the same line can't wait in the same station (or it is not as simple as it should be)
- The building tools are annoying. Why use drag and drop when you could just click once to start and click another time to just finish a segment then accept it or move the ending point. Not to mention you have to build segment by segment, can't do multiple points. Really annoying when you're building complex paths.
- Bridges and tunnels are a pain to build and they're way too high/low. Too much collision during building overall.
- Rails can't cross eachothers. You can't control what you wanna bulldoze so you'll end up destroying the 2 segments of a crossing when you only want one.
- No AI
- To replace a vehicle, it needs to go to a depot and you have to change them manually one by one ... REALLY ? After 25 years, I had like 30 vehicles and couldn't bear having to micro manage this part. Stopped playing right away on my first game. Depot aren't really fun to manage, trains don't need to service.
- The cargo chains are limited (but mods seems to fix that)
- The first 50 years are boring to me, not a lot of vehicles available (6 engines maybe ?) and they're extremely slow.
- Can't upgrade a station, have to pause the game, destroy it then build the new one. Stations limited to 5 platform. But since one line seems to use only one platform, you don't need more right now.
- Simplistic : the economy, the train tracks, etc. Did I mention the economy ?
- No map editor (yet)

And I'm probably forgetting some stuff.

Most of those points can be fixed but there are too many problems right now to make it really enjoyable.

I'm optimistic and hope they will sort everything out cause it got good foundations.
And hopefully, mods will make this game really complete.

Now, I don't recommend it, it's not finished and can be really frustrating. We'll see how they patch that game up.

It's good, but needs work. Some parts feel fustrating and not thought out properly
The good:
The look and feel of the world is stunning, lots going on and everything is visilbe
The Ease of setting up routes
The soundtrack
The cargo distrbution makes sense

The not so good:
Limited vechile managment, you can't just upgrade a vechile, you have to send it to depot, sell then buy a new one
Can't upgrade stations, you can't just add some more tracks to your station, you need to demolish it and rebuild it
Track buidling is fustrating, it often takes sevral attempts to get 2 tracks to join nicley
Actual managment of the company is non-exsistent

It's a good game and i will be playing more, it just feels like there could be a lot more ecspeccially for this price point. The main factor is building track feels limited once you built it, upgrading the layout is not easy