Nearly seven years after Transport Fever 2, Urban Games is making a comeback with its biggest sim game yet in its sequel. Transport Fever 3 aims to up the ante with an increased quantity of planes, trains and automobiles, with more complex routes and tycoon mechanics to make any fan of the genre salivate.
It was easy to sink well over 100 hours into Transport Fever 2, although the challenge quickly depreciated for experienced players. You can only lay down so many train lines connecting cities before being bored with lacklustre economic management and constant rewards. TF3’s tycoon mode ensures players will focus as much on production resources as their bank balance. The upcoming sequel also adds precise controls for managing the supply chain economy, with options to add individual warehouses, maintenance sliders for them and the vehicles and more. If you’ve got an idea for building the perfect utopia for transporting goods (and people), TF3 most likely includes options to build that into reality.
Urban Games wants players to inhabit and shape a living, breathing world. Systems such as a full day-and-night cycle, individual citizen simulation, a node-based map generator, multiple climate zones, and more help realise that vision. While crafting intersecting trade routes is still the heart of the game, the civ systems bring it closer to Cities: Skylines. You’ll have to contend with more than just subtractive routes, as the people travelling in those vehicles will have their own minds. Managing the people’s satisfaction levels by keeping a tab on pollution and noise levels also adds another interesting layer to the mix. However, a lot of the roadblocks you’ll face are never telegraphed properly, making it tougher on newer players.
The preview build also included access to two of the eight campaign scenarios, which slowly introduce the game’s various systems, all wrapped with some light story elements. Starting in the historical New Orleans around the Mardi Gras festival, the campaign takes creative liberties with world history across the eras. Like last time, TF3 will take players all the way from 1900 to 2033. The fourth campaign mission increases the complexity by asking players to manage a high-stakes concert, and anyone who has attended one in real life will tell you how important transportation, food and other amenities are in such a scenario.
Laying out your network requires coordination across routes on the ground, air and sea. Specialised maintenance depots are required to be installed to keep vehicles shiny, and you’re given more options for determining what kind of cargo is carried on them.
I played TF3 on a fairly well-balanced gaming PC equipped with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and a powerful Ryzen 7 5700X3D. While I thought that would be enough to power through the game with all its systems engaged, the build had other plans. I faced a slew of crashes and what I guessed to be memory leak issues. Turning down the resolution slider seemed to help, and I can’t fault the game too much as it’s still a development build. Framerates hovered anywhere between 50-100fps depending on the zoom level, the parameters that were being viewed, and the game speed engaged at the time.
Transport Fever 3 is aiming to be a relaxing game, welcoming new players to the genre just like Flight Simulator 2020 did, opening the floodgates to a whole new audience. While there are still some improvements to be made in the onboarding experience, I know that the passionate community will make Urban Games’ job easier with community-created mods. The enhanced tycoon mechanics are a welcome addition, increasing replayability and adding more dynamic parameters to ensure each playthrough is more personal.
Transport Fever 3 will release later in 2026 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
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