Transport Fever 2: And suddenly it's 4 o'clock in the morning ...

New details, finer micro-management and even more delicate components for builders, networking professionals and number crunchers. Transport Fever 2 goes from the hundredth to the thousandth, on land, on water and in the air. In our test, you can find out what the successor to the surprise success of 2016 has on the box.

With games like Sim City, Cities Skylines and others, I inevitably have to think of Reiner Werner Fassbinder's ancient TV classic "Welt am Draht". In my mind's eye, the bustling little inhabitants of artificial cities come alive, even have their own desires and goals that I just cannot recognize because they are so small and bustling. Who knows how real the whole thing is? Philosophically speaking, nobody knows whether we are not even part of a similar “matrix”.

It usually only takes a few minutes before I am completely immersed in such a miniature world. Hours after hours pass me by almost unnoticed until I wake up in terror and find that a round of sleep would be good at four in the morning. If a game does something like that, it's really good.

Until late at night

Transport Fever 2 is such a game with an endless, relationship-threatening addiction factor. The main task sounds so simple: Build roads and rails for your transport empire and create transport routes with which you can transport passengers and goods for money. Well, if there's nothing else.

What sounds like a halved city skyline is actually a huge puzzle of miniature traffic and economic simulation on a gigantic scale. The mere opportunity to switch fluently from the microcosm of individual streets to the macro view of a complete stretch of land is captivating and fascinating. I could just watch the goings-on for hours and would be extremely satisfied if there weren't those little unnecessary blunders.

I get annoyed with the ready-made scenarios. Sometimes about game goals that are presented to me without a useful tutorial, sometimes about cryptic goal descriptions or the partially unfinished translation. Aargh! But I'll start with the simplest, so that you don't just understand the train station.

If you look at the game from the smallest possible action, everything looks so simple. You add a few more to the streets of an automatically generated city, set a few stops, buy a car depot and a vehicle and off you go. As long as the wagons know which stops to go to first, they automatically pick up goods or passengers and take them to their destination. For example, mined ore to a metal factory. It works similarly with trains, ships and airplanes.

Everyday life is varied: determining tram lines, shopping for stage coaches, building train stations, laying tracks, loading goods, carriage of passengers, creating airlines … This game covers pretty much every aspect that can exist in a traffic tycoon, turning everyone economically relevant wheels and still continuously exudes the charm of an oversized model train.

I would like to just let the simulation continue during my bedtime, but my conscience doesn't allow that in the era of Fridays for Future. My Core i9 main processor slaves in turbo mode during this game, pulling a third more juice than usual and causing my silent fan to mutate into an aircraft turbine. So there is a lot going on in the background.

On top of that, I would probably ruin my small traffic empire while it is unguarded, because despite certain automatable switches, local and long-distance traffic always need a shot of human guidance. Unprofitable lines have to be discontinued or redesigned, broken vehicles replaced or repaired and adapted to the constantly growing requirements.

Small settlements that still seem manageable in the middle of the virtual 18th century grow into metropolises over the decades because prosperity comes with economic success. The more people populate the cities, the more need for goods and means of transport, which in turn are supplied by companies that also strive for expansion. There is no end. Economist? Planning Ass? Schönbauer? Regardless of which branch you use to meet the game principle, there is space and benefit for everyone. Just putting traffic lights on roads and rails can become your own science if you want to plan efficiently.

Hard school

Until then, however, it is a rocky road because the makers of Urban Games find it difficult to convey the economic connections. The campaign-off spokesman may sarcastically sarcastic anecdotes from the stack when explaining the current tasks, without a decent tutorial, even the manageable first scenarios are sometimes hair-raising. After the first hour of the game it was clear to me that in Transport Fever 2 you wouldn't see a country without a little fiddling and trying around.

Example: An early side goal of the campaign pretends to build a headquarters. Which type of building it is about, where it can be found and what advantages it brings, is not even touched on in any line. Another example: A warning menu pops up and says there are problems with a line. But what kind of problems are not conveyed, unless it is about simple things like a poor connection to a stop.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Why, for example, a timber supplier does not deliver timber before its end customer has full traffic connections from start to finish, remains puzzling. It would be much more user-friendly if the warehouses and transshipment centers, of which masses are now being built, burst at the seams due to the sheer number of deliveries. Compared to the predecessor, there are only direct retail chains without alternative alternatives, but why these are still determined by the transport instead of the producer is not clear to me.

Transport Fever 2 makes logisticians the main organizer and manager of entire economic sectors, which unfortunately seems to me to be very illogical and puts rough stones in the way for beginners. Especially when entire business chains are connected. To supply a city with schnapps, the local distillery needs a transport company. Before that, however, she wants to be supplied with cactus juice from a farm, which in turn needs fertilizer from another location. Everything is quite logical and understandable, if you know what the game wants from you. Just a shame that the game designers leave beginners completely alone with fumbling out.

Sure, there are many nice menus and image filters that explain economic cycles using demand charts, but I find it all very dry and less intuitive. One or the other hint by tool tip would work wonders. This also applies to the control. How do beginners know that they can turn stations with the N and M keys, unless they scurry through the endless control list in the game options? A small written note when building the first train station would smooth out many forehead lines for beginners.

An endless playground

It all sounds like harsh criticism, and I can't deny that some of these blunders annoy me. After all, it is difficult enough to maintain the economic efficiency of the individual modes of transport once you know what to do. As soon as you have strapped where there is what need, the whole game principle slips pretty well and leaves a lot of creative freedom.

In contrast to its predecessor, Transport Fever 2 allows the modular expansion of many nodes. Truck transshipment points are given larger storage areas, train stations additional buildings, new tracks and waiting platforms. Meanwhile, airports are being given new halls – if there is a need.

Those who just tinker with it run the risk of counteracting the bankruptcy despite the millions of accounts. A loan from the bank can only delay this for a short time, because annual depreciation is doubled and tripled very quickly if you don't have customers who pay for vehicles and storage.

The secret of success lies in short-term planning. Small investments pay off better than huge, pre-planned mammoth projects. This applies to every single facet of the game. See, for example, laying rails or highways. If you simply pull a gigantic track from one city to another, you pay huge sums for tunnels and routes that sometimes would not be necessary. If you also take the time to adjust the terrain in terms of height and quality using terraforming tools, you not only save money, but can also create beautiful connections.

Trucker-Rick on the wrong track – With Transport Fever 2 as Rickmeister

Trucker-Rick is going astray today. He is on the road as Rickmeister in Transport Fever 2.

As for that, Transport Fever 2 is a bottomless pit anyway – and not just in the current scenarios. If you want, you can create huge landscapes in advance in an editor: with cities, economic sources, surfaces and all the trimmings, with several territorial themes setting the tone. So there is not only a different flora on European soil than in the Caribbean setting, but also other models for trains, ships, trams and transport vehicles.

Historical lessons

Depending on whether you want to start the campaign with its pre-built game goals or simply try your hand in free mode to supply an endlessly running empire, the territorial requirements are different. The campaign links the gameplay chapter by chapter with historical events and tries to sell them as a lesson in a not too serious way.

Due to the lack of time limits and the tight budget, these lessons are aimed more at the presentation of the individual game elements than at economic contexts, but are always amusing. In any case, I learned more about historical vehicles as part of the campaign than about the epoch illuminated in itself. If you want, you can continue to stay in one scenario after completing the main goal and the three secondary goals in order to grow it in the temporal context.

I found the historically linear thread running from early industrialization to the high-tech era, despite the cut-down stumbling blocks in conveying individual game goals, to be very entertaining because narratively cleverly threaded. In each chapter, a completely different part in history is touched upon, from the Trans-Siberian Railway to the early days of aviation to the Shinkansen train.