I enjoy playing a good city builder like Cities Skylines and I’ve tried a railroad tycoon game before, but it didn’t grab me like I thought it would. I think it was called Railroad Empires? Transportation history and the technology involved is one of my favorite aspects of history to study. That’s why I wished there were more train sim games that were set in the 19th century. Transport Fever 2 caught my attention because it covered all aspects of transportation, not just railroads. Being able to become a transport magnate was enough for me to grab this on a sale.

This game is no slouch in the graphics department. All the buildings are detailed to reflect their time period and location. The citizens do the same, but they aren’t as detailed. They don’t need to be since you play this game from a bird’s eye view. The real stars are the vehicle models. There’s a healthy mix of vehicles and you can follow them using a chase camera. You can zoom in real close to inspect the models. Your selection of vehicles changes depending on the location and era. Steam engines for the Old West, Russian models in the Siberian level, electric trams in Chicago. They are all real models of trains and you get a little description and stats page for them. The music isn’t a high point. All the tracks are good and fit the location, but there’s not enough diversity in songs. A management sim like this is a game you sit down and play for several hours. The music was a bit loud too, often drowning out the voice acting. Luckily there is an in-game media player, so I could turn down the music. I often left this on the lowest setting, so there was some background noise, but it was quiet enough I didn’t notice the repetition.

One thing I didn’t expect from this game was a loose story mode. These types of games usually just give you a scenario to play through or a sandbox to build in. Transport Fever 2 has you playing through different scenarios as well, but there’s a lot of flavor text for each scenario. They are organized in 3 chapters that cover a different era of transportation history. The first chapter covers scenarios about the railroad & shipping industry of the 19th century, chapter two covers the 20th century, and the third chapter is modern times. Each scenario also pulls from real history, which really helped engross me. You run a railroad during the Old West Silver Rush in Colorado, manage an airline for Howard Hughes during the rise of Hollywood’s golden age, and control the state-owned rail system during the Great Leap Forward in China. In the first chapter each scenario is narrated by a Scottish man who sounds like he does voice overs for history documentaries. The second chapter narrator is a little more generic British. During each scenario, they tell you what your objectives are along with a little update about the actual history going on and some humor thrown in occasionally. It gives this game more charm than if I just had a static to do list to check off. I did find it odd the 19th century chapter started off with a disclaimer that they do not condone or support the history represented here. There was nothing in the chapter that seemed like particularly unsavory history.

As you play through a scenario you have your main objectives, but occasionally some side objectives will pop up. These are usually a little more tongue in cheek than the main tasks. In the Old West, you help the Cartwrights at Ponderosa Ranch. It’s a Bonanza reference and if you get the joke, you get a little chuckle, if you don’t it just seems like a random side mission. In Scotland there’s a reference to the Outlander series and during the Hollywood mission, there’s a mission about Hughes filming the Conqueror with John Wayne. There were probably plenty of other references I missed because the game drops them subtly. This side missions may have you doing something akin to the main objectives like “bring X amount of {blank} to this city”, but others get creative. There’s one where you dig for treasure by using the terraform tool to put divots in a mountain, another has you herding sheep.

Course the story isn’t what makes this kind of game, the gameplay is. Transport Fever 2 is the perfect mix of simple and complex. Most of the basic actions you do, like setting up bus lines, laying out railroads, building depots, etc., is fairly intuitive. There’s a nice overlay map that lets you see your routes and adding stops is done in a way that makes sense. Those base skills will get you through most of the scenarios, but you learn to build off those. You can get more trains running on a line if you build spots along the tracks where a train can pull off to let others pass or by adding in stop signals. You can set how much of a certain product a train will haul so you can have locomotives that multitask. Do you build a rail station next to a warehouse deep in a town or have a wagon pick up the goods from the train and bring them into town. You can see where the population of city lives and make sure your bus/trolley lines are running through them to ensure maximum profit.

Luckily for me, money management isn’t a strong focus here. You start each scenario with more than enough money. Long as you follow the objective’s request and don’t go crazy laying down train tracks, you’ll always have enough money to get the job done. The only time I ended up in the negative is during the Persia level. I overbuilt one of the rail lines hoping to get more profit, but the costs outweighed the revenue. I was in the red and not able to finish the big project of building a rail through the mountains. You don’t lose the game if you go bankrupt, but you do have figure out how to make money back. I ended up taking out a crap ton of loans to finish the railroad. The scenario only cares that you finish the objectives, you don’t have to pay back your outstanding loans. So, I ended that level severely in debt.

I did end up losing interest in the game when I got towards the end of the 2nd chapter. I’d seen most of what the game had to offer and the missions in Maoist China were starting to feel more like busy work. I may go back, just to see what’s in the 3rd chapter, I’m guessing a bigger focus on airplanes and bullet trains, but it’ll be a while. There’s a map editor mode I dabbled with a bit. You can make your dream landscape that lets you mix all the forms of transportation to your heart’s content. I put a river through the middle of my map to encourage maritime shipping. You can choose where towns are located and what industries are available.

All in all, this game is probably my favorite sim management game like this. It’s much more specialized than Cities Skylines. I like that game too, but it’s nice to solely focus on managing transportation and shipping and not having to worry about crime rates, building zones, or populace happiness. Transport Fever 2 has the childish joy of getting to build and play with a sprawling train set. There’s busses & planes, and boats, but trains are definitely the main focus. If you like building webs of railroads, setting up public bus lines, making shipping efficient as possible, exploring history through transportation, then I can heartily recommend this game.