Transport Fever released with day-1 Linux support, some thoughts

The newest simulation game for Linux, ‘Transport Fever’ [GOG, Steam] is now available, and I spent some time with it before release to see if it is worth your monies.

Disclosure: Key provided by the developer.

I love simulation games and I have been eagerly waiting on Transport Fever to have a different take on the genre compared to say, Cities Skylines, which focuses on building the actual city, whereas Transport Fever is more about dealing with the vehicles, aircrafts, boats and so on directly. With you setting where buses pick up and drop off and purchasing the actual vehicles and carriages themselves. You have a lot more direct control in this game, and in general it does feel a lot like Cities Skylines. The interface is even quite similar too, so you will feel at home with Transport Fever if you played Cities.

The game has a pretty decent tutorial, one that I certainly recommend you play, as there’s a few bits you will need to get your head around, but it’s all relatively simple. Then you have two different campaigns and a free mode to do whatever the heck you want.

What I really like about Transport Fever is that nothing is too complicated, except for getting train lines to properly line up. It has a very clean interface that doesn’t complicate anything. Sorting out different transport network lines, for example, is damn easy. You put a stop down, bring up the line manager, pick a line and then click on the station. That stop is now part of that network, it’s easy to understand and control, which makes playing it an absolute breeze.

You don’t need to build bridges or tunnels, as pointing a train line over water will auto-build a bridge for you, or a tunnel through a mountain. Again, it makes it simple to do without fussing around with too many little things. Tunnels get expensive though, so watch your finances it's incredibly easy to get into debt very early on.

I really love that each individual person is simulated in the game, you can see them wander from location to location, wait around for a bus or a train and see them go about their daily business. You can even set the camera to follow a specific person, vehicle or whatever and keep an eye on them too.

I know I said I liked that it didn’t make you fuss with the little things, but this next part I would have thought would be something you had to sort yourself: I connected up a train hub (where you purchase trains) to a track to actually get some trains in my rail network. I purchased a train and a carriage for it, then assigned it to a train line. Once it left the hub and went to the station, I thought I would need something to allow the train to turn around, but it magically switched directions when it got to the station. This was a massive let down for such an in-depth simulation game to completely disregard the need for direction when it comes to trains. I mean, that’s the whole point of the game isn’t it? The fine-grained controls and management of the units themselves, so to have a train magically change direction at a station was quite rubbish. It takes part of the challenge and fun away from it, to not have to think about their direction. I had great plans for some sort of turntable (because damn that would look cool!), or at the very least needing to build a track that loops at the end to allow it to turn around.



It was surprisingly fun getting multiple trains going on a single track, with having to make allowances for two train lines converging into a station, with traffic lights to make sure they are able to wait if needed to allow another train to leave the station. That simulation side of it was surprisingly well done and, again, simple enough to get to grips with.

It’s not just transporting people you need to think about, but raw materials and general goods as well. You have construction yards that create materials for your city to prosper, but they need to be transported into the city.

You will need a truck station next to a construction yard for your purchased trucks to ferry materials to another station inside the city. This leads me to another sad point in the game: materials magically get sent from a construction yard to a nearby truck station—it just doesn’t make sense. It feels like the magic trains all over again where the developers have cut a corner in the games development. If you were able to have the trucks pick up directly from the construction yard or goods manufacturer, and drop them off at a station inside the city, it would remove the need for two truck stations, and remove the magic material transfer while still making sense.

In the game you have different factories that make various goods, like a Saw Mill which turns logs into planks, which can then be sent to a Goods Factory to produce a rather generic “Goods”. You will need to ferry logs to the Saw Mill, and then ferry those planks to the Goods Factory. Then shift those Goods into a city that needs them to help that city grow. You repeat this for different goods, and for factories that need multiple types of raw materials. Are you keeping up?

A point that makes this difficult is when setting down transport lines from one truck station sat by a factory to another, is that the Materials and Goods icons for what factories produce vanish. This can make it extremely confusing when remembering exactly what factory you want to ferry produce from. There’s literally no reason to hide the icons when you’re assigning transport lines, so I hope they fix that quickly. I reported this to the developer, and they tell me they have passed this onto the relevant people.

During the first part of the American campaign, you will see a railroad that is supposed to go off-screen, to signify a track going across America, but instead due to the way the game is built the track just ends at the end of the map which looks silly:


Buildings have static roads attached to them, which don’t line up to your current technology level, which looks very out of place:


There’s many graphical inconsistencies like that, which are hard to miss.

Seeing your city prosper through the ages is damn cool, getting access to new technologies in transport and just watching everything grow is really great and it’s a damn time-sink.

Performance
The performance of the game has been more than a little troublesome. There are a lot of dips in the framerate and stuttering when building and zooming in and out which is extremely annoying. You can see graphics popping in and out as you zoom quite a lot, which does not look good.

At one point I was building an additional train line alongside a current one, while moving the mouse along to lay the track down, the FPS went into single digits making it a real hassle.

It becomes sluggish too often, the performance of the game just isn’t up to a good standard yet, even on my i7/980ti setup it’s not enough.

Issues
I dislike the rotation with the middle mouse button, it feels like it’s done backwards for me. I would appreciate an ability to invert it and set the speed of it too. Feels like some basic control adjustments are missing.

The default hotkeys are a mess for camera controls, and a large amount of them aren’t even set.

At times the WASD scrolling buttons would randomly refuse to work for a for second or two, and then start working again.

Overall it’s okay, not so in-depth that you will get completely lost, but it has multiple issues that just shouldn’t be there. The performance issues are plenty, and some gameplay mechanics just aren’t well thought out.

I did enjoy some of it, but I would enjoy it a ton more if they fix the many niggling issues that I outlined above. Personally, I cannot recommend it right now until some of these issues are solved. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.