Transport Fever 3

Transport Fever 3 makes building a transport empire deeply rewarding, pairing intuitive tools with engaging logistical challenges. Its charming historical campaign, highly replayable sandbox and excellent performance make it a standout transport management game. Minor interface shortcomings do little to diminish an experience that kept us happily expanding our network after 30 hours.

Transport Fever 3 is a wonderful new addition to the series. With more vehicles, improved graphics, more user-friendly interface, and a modding scene that’s already impressive, I’ve had an absolute blast playing TF3 – and those measly 74 hours I’ve managed to squeeze in over the weekends and late at night are just the beginning. It’s just a shame that, although the game looks lovely, it runs a touch poorly. I really wanted to give it a 9/10, but I simply couldn’t with such severe frame rate drops on high-end hardware.

Rethinking and centralizing operations is an integral part of Transport Fever 3: tasks initially handled by three small stations will eventually need to be routed through a single, massive terminal—a process that requires meticulous track planning as the lines increasingly crisscross one another. However, you are also free to scar the landscape with hundreds of different railway lines, turning the map into a tangled mess of spaghetti. Your game, your rules: difficulty can be adjusted via numerous options tied to every game mechanic, though I recommend veterans start on "Hard" right away to limit the abundant extra profit opportunities found in "Normal" mode. The game is available in Italian and features an excellent soundtrack.

Transport Fever 3 follows the spirit and fun of the original Transport Tycoon from the nineties, with a polished graphical system, much more information to analyze, and the challenging difficulty that makes it so entertaining. Watching cities grow thanks to your transportation network is just as rewarding as watching your company’s bank account grow, allowing you to purchase ships and airports. If you’re into complex tycoon games and love trains, trucks, and airplanes, this is your game.

Transport Fever 3 is the most visually stunning and engaging instalment in the series’ history. However, there is still room for improvement when it comes to immersion and variety.

While Transport Fever 3 might feel familiar to OG fans of the series, it brings much deeper mechanics and a larger vehicle roster which makes it Urban Games’ most polished transport strategy game yet.

Transport Fever 3 offers extensive freedom in its sandbox mode, while the campaign helps players learn the game and explore its historical setting. Although the menus can initially feel overwhelming, its strong progression system keeps the experience engaging through growing towns and unlocking new vehicles and buildings. Long loading times, FPS drops, and limited graphical improvements are drawbacks, but managing transport lines remains highly engaging.

I’m requesting a refund, assuming it gets approved. I’d been waiting for this game all year and actively following the news on YouTube. I was impressed by TF2 and logged nearly 100 hours in it. However, I lost interest in continuing because I hit optimization limits; the map had grown so complex that the system couldn't handle the load anymore (and mind you, I’m running an RTX 4090).I pre-ordered it the moment it became available, and here’s the verdict:Yes, this is a stripped-down version of TF2. The previous game is leagues ahead of this "new" installment, largely thanks to mods. It’s simply unpleasant to play.From the very first minute, there’s screen stutter and lag—and that’s on my hardware. I don’t know what they were doing during the closed beta, but this is an absolute failure. 40 FPS at ground level and 120 FPS from a bird's-eye view—it’s a joke.There are plenty of bugs in the game:1. One road decided to shift a meter to the left, as if it were a separate entity.2. I couldn't get the meat supply chain working several times because the little helicopter refused to transport it to the warehouse....After playing TF2 for ten years, it’s unbearable to watch buses flip around on the X/Y axis instead of performing a proper U-turn. It’s infuriating when a vehicle is forced to drive all the way to the edge of the road instead of just turning around at the nearest intersection.Developers, do you really think that because we play from a bird's-eye view, these small details don't matter? I deal with enough Excel spreadsheets at work; why would I want to play a simulator of multicolored lines labeled as "routes"? I realize they’ll probably fix this in a couple of years and active modders will polish the game to perfection, but you’re better off playing TF2 than buying this laughingstock.Some people say the visuals have improved? My first thought when loading a map was: "Am I playing TF2 with a cartoon mod?" I’m not asking for realism—that would just unnecessarily overload the game—but the vehicles... I’ve seen better-looking cars in *SimCity* or *Cities: ****, and don't get me started on the map edges. Even in the second game, the feeling of working inside Blender really annoyed me. Why couldn't they handle the map boundaries better? Why not render an endless landscape within view and just use a semi-transparent wall as a barrier? It’s a disaster—seriously, it’s awful. Why do I need to see the layers of the earth? Why not just show the planet's core while they're at it? Am I supposed to find a dinosaur in one of those strata?So, five years of development went by—and what did they actually do? Add a subway and some little helicopters? This game is a scam; they should have just called it a TF2 DLC and pushed an update. Would I have paid for a TF2 DLC and upgrade? YES—but not at the price point of a proper AA game.Bugs: 2/10Optimization: 1/10Graphics: 3/10New mechanics: 2/10Price: 1/10Overall: 1.8/10

The game has a decent idea behind it, but a lot of things just don’t work as well as they should. Some mechanics feel unnecessarily tedious, and the progression can get pretty boring after a while. There are also some technical issues and small bugs that make the experience less enjoyable. After playing for a while, I just didn’t feel motivated to keep going. With more polish and refinement, this could have been a much better game.