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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

This game is frustrating as hell and punishes you for not knowing how to play but but it doesn't tell you how to play?
I tried playing several times but found myself wanting to play anything else. it looks nice i gess. trains are cool.

I studied mechanical engineering and I also lernt programming pc. Terrain alignment collision when I wanted build a road tunnel or a road bridge across railway happened very often. How many times must I try build simple bridge? I did play Transport tycoon deluxe very often in past and even Train Fever is graphically better game 3D made it much more unplayable and this game is devolution if we are talking about quality of gameplay and how computer can help me to design game objects.

Awkward controls. Terrible performance, even on Skylake and a R9 GPU. Poor balance, with trains being super-expensive. Fiddly track laying controls and primitive terrain handling. No Steamworks support for mods. You're better off with Railroad Tycoon.

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.