Good Shepherd’s Transport Fever 2, which was developed by Urban Games, has made the jump to console platforms, with versions for both current and last gen Xbox and PlayStation systems. We took a look at the PS5 version.
The sim/tycoon genre has always been kind of tied to PC gaming, ever since it became popular through games like Sim City and Railroad Tycoon about three decades ago. More recently, it’s been a genre where it’s hard to find a game that doesn’t get tons of post-release DLC, making it either costly to jump in and stick around or tricky to figure out when to jump aboard for the ride – if at all. The Transport Fever games are a very pleasant exception to this rule, so it’s great to see it come to consoles.
Despite having everything it has to offer already included in the base game, Transport Fever 2 certainly isn’t short on content – busses, trains and airplanes are all accounted for, and managing the morning and evening rush is just a much a part of your job as figuring out where to put a big train station. And there isn’t just a singular option for all these methods of transportation, there’s a lot to choose from and the game does a great job at guiding your through its mechanics with a built-in tutorial.
Another great way to keep learning is to play through the game’s extensive campaign, which doesn’t just focus on teaching you the mechanics and applying them to different scenarios but also takes you on a journey through time, introducing new methods of transport as you go from the middle of the nineteenth century all the way up to today. And while the basics remain more or less a constant, it’s nice to always have new options to consider and put into place. In other words, raw materials will always need to be processed, moved around, turned into products and sold – but the way they move from A to B changes over time and is up to you.
It’s not just about goods though, as people also have a need for transportation. Get everything running at once, and it’s impressive and fun to just watch everything unfold as you switch between camera perspectives. Early on you’ll still have horses moving back and forth, but eventually there’s high speed mass transit as well – though everything has its pluses and minuses in terms of impact, cost and upkeep. The game is visually appealing too, which makes zooming in and checking out little details – and performance doesn’t seem to suffer when you do, not even when your city grows to impressive proportions.
Also impressive on a technical level is that they’ve managed to squeeze the user interface and control scheme onto a console despite the keyboard and mouse origins of the game (and entire genre). What helps is that Transport Fever 2 doesn’t lean too heavily into the micromanagement of things either, making it a good candidate for a console version. There’s tons of replay value as well, because after playing the campaign you can also engage with its sandbox/free play mode, letting you experiment with different terrain, parts of the worlds (and their respective transport option) and even climate systems. This is one of those games that, once it grabs you, can be played for a really long time indeed.
Score: 8.0/10
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