Transport Fever 2 Review (Sanaro)
I'm giving a thumbs up knowing that this game is not for everyone. It's a niche model train game that simulates the economics of running both passenger and cargo trains. It also includes ground, air and ship transport class vehicles. This review will sound mostly negative but I do enjoy playing the game.
If played properly (whatever that really means to the individual player) the game can be difficult in the early stages. Once the player is operating with an annual positive profit paying off the company debt is easy. At that point in the game it becomes very difficult to fail, money concerns disappear shortly thereafter and the economic challenge is gone. From that point going forward the object of the games becomes making an aesthetically pleasing map.
"Running" an airline is included in the game. In this there is little challenge. It's too simple. You build at least two airports, make an air route, buy a plane, transport passengers or cargo to the airport and fly the same to the other airport. The scale, however, is completely wrong and just doesn't go well with the base game. A large international airport is at least as large as the entire city it is serving. Modern wide body jets are, given the scale,almost 1000 feet long and wide. The largest maps available are, again given the scale, only 10 kilometres apart. In the real world one could ride a bicycle from one city to the other and beat a jet transport aircraft if the distance is only 10 km. I rarely set up airlines because of poor scaling.
Ships are a lot closer to being true to scale. Here's where the aircraft scale is wrong. A 1000' long container ship is the same length as a Boeing 747. Shipping cargo by sea does work well. This is a strong point of the game when you've used trucks to transport raw materials to a rail head, transported the materials by train to a manufacturing plant, loaded the manufactured goods back onto a train and dropped it off at a sea port. You then transport the goods by ship to a far away harbor to be consumed in that city or have it distributed to one or more additional cities. Making that work well is satisfying and fun.
If you can ignore that the game has some clunkyness in its menus, it can be a bit finicky with placing tracks and bridges, accept that the AI can easily become confused while routing trains over complex track layouts if you make edits to the track configuration and also accept airplanes are monstrously large the game can be fun. As said up front, it is a niche genre that isn't for everyone.