It's not Transport Tycoon, but it could have been
I downloaded the game, and started in the tutorial. First thing is the tutorial for once in a game actually does a good job and is not too long and not too boring. I then went on to sandbox. Campaign just doesn't interest me.
The first dissapointment for me, (personally) is that Paris isn't a city that is re-created. I was hoping to re-create the Paris Metro. But alas this was not going to happen. So, Berlin it was. The city wasn't amazingly well put together but adequate for a micro-management game. The interface is very nice and easy to use.
So from this point I jumped in and started to make my Metro system. It's very easy to make your transport system, but very much a huge challenge to get it running perfectly.
For example, on my Metro system I had a line that went in a plain circle in the centre of the city, one going to the suburbs and one going from one of the train stations to a convention centre, and one connecting one train station to another. Ironically it was the short line to the convention centre that was most profitable, didn't have huge queues of angry passengers and was running most reliably. Didn't make sense. Tried all sorts to sort the other lines out, tried more trains, less trains, re-doing the stops etc but customers built up in their hundreds getting angry.
The bus system unfortunatly suffers the same. You see, the buses just don't travel between the stops fast enough, the passengers happiness degrades much faster unless you have one stop right next to another within reason.
This may just be me but it seems there is something wrong with the passengers and making a profit etc. If your someone who stayed up all night as a child getting every bit of your train set working great and how you wanted it to, then this game may be perfect as it will require large investments of your time going over graphs and trial and error etc to get your transportation system running how you'd like it to.
Graphically the game looks good and on my system(see bottom of review) runs on top settings at 1080p very smoothly. The sound is also good, not fantastic, but good.
So why is this review 8.5? Whats the game really missing? Well, i'm not too sure. Something is missing. It feels like it's almost a great micro-management game but i think theres not enough of the micro and too much of the bigger picture overall. I also dislike being unable to transport goods etc.
I think with a few patches, maybe some more cities and perhaps being able to generate some generic maps would help. Maybe even a multiplayer would be good but not absolutely required.
I wouldn't say this is a bad game, but I think it falls short. However, I can forgive this game as it does only have a £14.99 price tag on Steam at the time of review.
Reviewed on:
AMD Athlon X2 6000+
4GB DDR2 667Mhz RAM
ATi Radeon 5870 1GB (running at 1080p)
1TB WD Hard Drive
Gigabyte GA-57SLi-S4 motherboard