Transport Fever 3 review – lose yourself in logistic bliss

If you told me a game about building a transport empire could be this cosy, I wouldn’t have believed you. I was expecting, at the very least, a minigame where you de-vomit the back seat of a night bus. But Transport Fever 3, despite the odd foible, is in danger of becoming my go-to relaxation game.

What makes Transport Fever 3 so appealing is that it gives you all the joys of a city builder, without having to actually build the city. There’s a notable lack of death and destruction, to the point where pedestrians pause politely to let your various vehicles pass. It’s safe to say that if your idea of fun is unleashing a kaiju on an unsuspecting metropolis, this probably isn’t for you.

If, on the other hand, you love cleaning up messes, Transport Fever 3 will seriously scratch that itch. Aside from the main sandbox mode, it boasts eight campaign levels, stretching from 1900s New Orleans to a futuristic Japan. The former is a solid introduction to the game’s mechanics, but others introduce some mission-specific mechanics that are sure to delight.

It helps that, future Japan aside, many of the missions are tied to actual events or locations. One has you helping set up Woodstock, and if you want a hint of what you could have to deal with, both the original festival and ’94 and ’99 famously suffered from toilet provision issues. What could possibly go wrong?

But as refreshing as Transport Fever 3’s campaign missions are, it was the open-ended sandbox mode that really hooked me. You can start way back in the 1900s, with horse-drawn carriages and the odd steam-driven truck, all the up to the modern day. For me, the sweet spot is the 1950s. Whatever era you choose, though, it’s your decisions that dictate whether each map’s multiple settlements prosper or stagnate.

The smart move is to pick one village/city as your base, and start implementing a basic public transport provision. Aside from raising citizens’ happiness levels, supplying them with the appropriate goods (they vary between towns) fuels the town’s collective growth. Instead of just laying down tracks or a road, then building a vehicle at a depot, you have to create a route, or line, for the vehicles to follow. I found this a tad onerous at first, but the more time I spent with Transport Fever 3, the more I appreciated the feature, as well as the myriad other mechanics on offer.

New buildings pop up and existing ones grow, a spectacle that never failed to give me the warm fuzzies. On top of successfully supplying goods to a city, noise, pollution, reputation and other stats inform your success. Reputation is a delightfully unexpected factor. Knock down a copse of trees and it’ll drop; destroy a building and it’ll plunge further.

You don’t absolutely have to delve into every single aspect of the game, on normal difficulty at least. Want to dive into train signalling or congestion heat maps? Go right ahead, there’s so, so much information to be mined. And if not? Transport Fever 3 isn’t going to punish you for it; it’s as deep as you want it to be. It’s also as chilled out as you desire – even the optional challenges give you a year upwards of in-game time to complete them, meaning you can pretty much take them at your own pace.

One aspect of Transport Fever 3 that can sometimes feel like a punishment is the interface, certainly on PS5. For example, rather than just clicking on a building, you have to hold down a button to activate inspection mode. Road and track building can occasionally feel like a wrangle, too; I twice received an angry red warning because my roads weren’t quite connected, even though, until I zoomed right in, it appeared they were.

My other gripe with Transport Fever 3 stems from the aforementioned zoom option. It’s a brilliant feature; you can follow each individual city dweller and, with a flick of the thumb stick, ride inside any land, sea or air vehicle. However, it also reveals the capacity of many vehicles, buses in particular, is incorrect. One bus (the game uses real historical vehicles) could hold 30 plus passengers, but in-game, only 10. Zooming in revealed plenty of empty seats and while it’s likely a concession to balance, it’s frustrating when you have 25 or so people queuing at one stop.

Those gripes aside, the game succeeds precisely because of its narrow focus; there’s no research (vehicles are just invented), no cut-throat competition to leave you sobbing into your bankruptcy notice, just a world awaiting your finely-tuned transport solutions. And when you’re done? Just tweak them some more; it’s not even been a day since I last touched the game and I’m still itching to get back to bettering my network. A foot wide and a mile deep, Transport Fever 3 is a must play for logistics lovers and detail-oriented management fans.