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Transport Fever 3 promises an impressive attention to detail
C
Charlie Wacholz
I went into my hands-on demo of Transport Fever 3 with a plucky attitude (and a fresh glow from riding on Cologne’s 9-line streetcar), and even though I was admittedly a little overwhelmed by the game’s complex control scheme and staggering scale, I ultimately walked away impressed by Urban Games’ fourth transportation tycoon game. After a brief overview from senior CG artist Daniel Guimard, I had about 20 minutes to scratch away at the surface of this dense simulator.
The Transport Fever series is all about optimizing simulated urban and industrial environments to help cities grow while improving the quality of life. Spanning from 1900 to the present day, I was immediately blown away by the attention to detail in both the vehicle and environmental design on display here, from capturing decades’ worth of real buses, trains, and more, to building a realistic skybox that reacts to environmental changes like humidity, time of day, that even has a realistic star map. That fidelity has been a major focus for Urban Games' strategy in developing Transport Fever 3.
For example, during his presentation, Guimard was building a train station near a factory to help improve the train line’s ridership and to supplement the industry's output. He showed us what the efficiency of that station might look like with a small platform, before placing a larger one, allowing more people to pass through at a time, whereas the difference in platform size would’ve been cosmetic in previous games. Transport Fever 3 seems rife with changes that make this exact marriage between cosmetic and mechanical innovations in your city across the board. Now, different elevations and biomes will impact which types of industries thrive, for example.
The demo I played mostly focused on designing industrial infrastructure rather than transit, but I still managed to find a way to live out my urban planning nerd fantasy. There was a mine near a small town that wasn’t doing very well, and the industry was threatening to leave if I didn’t do something. So I placed a few bus stations in convenient locations in the community, running a line with stops in a residential and shopping district that also connected to the quarry, opening up more traffic through to multiple economic zones.
Since the majority of the route ran through a residential area, I took care in choosing my vehicle to make sure it didn’t disrupt the local community. I wound up choosing a recreation of Citroen’s U55 Currus Cityrama, a cool sci-fi-looking bus used in Paris during the 1950s and '60s—I seriously recommend looking it up; it’s the coolest bus design I’ve ever seen. While its retrofuturistic look was appealing, I mostly chose it for its stat spread (split between Speed, Comfort, Noise, and Pollution) to best serve the community. It wound up putting me in debt, but I thought it was a worthwhile long-term investment since each resident has their own gauge measuring their happiness.
Oddly enough, that specific balance between risk and reward for investing in different modes of transit and types of industries reminded me a lot of some of my favorite roguelikes, only at a slower pace. Again, like a good roguelike, Transport Fever 3’s various industries can play into or against each other, almost like the power spikes that play off of each other in a winning roguelike build. An example Guimard used was fertilizer, which can boost the speed and production of agricultural industries, but requires an advanced chemical industry to produce.
Even after an hour of furious note-taking and wide-eyed nodding, shocked by just how deep the rabbit hole goes, I feel like I’ve barely seen a fraction of a percent of what this game has to offer. And as an urbanist and transit enthusiast, I could’ve easily spent an entire day in this demo poring over optimal inter-city routes and designing neighborhoods while ushering my society into the 21st century.
The transit tycoon is currently set to release in 2026. If you’re interested in learning more, check out the Transport Fever 3 store page on the Epic Games storefront.
