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One of the best transport sims available, depending on what you are more interested in simulating. If you want to supply towns and see them grow, maybe from cab views of different types of vehicles, then it will serve you very well. However, if you want to simulate realistic tycoon management, it falls short because you can easily cheese the game, and are expected to do so in higher difficulties. For instance, you get paid by distance, so you can earn more for supplying from a far away factory even if one is available near a town. Similarly, you don’t even need to complete production chains and supply towns, which start with lowers demands and grow slowly. Instead, you can just supply factories with raw materials endlessly for profit without caring about the produced goods.
However, these are not the things that bother me most as the final result of supplying towns and watching them grow is very satisfying. Moreover, the modular construction is probably the best feature of the game as it allows you to make multipurpose railway stations, harbours and truck depots with exactly the number of parts to suit your purpose. Be warned though, connecting everything with everything in the hope of creating a transport hub often backfires with goods clogging up spaces in your vehicles and reaching places you don’t want them to. You can further make the game just as realistic as you want with countless mods.
Nevertheless, there are two things that make me hesitate calling it the best game in the genre: first, the track-laying system; I have to mention Railway Empire where you can modify the curves of railway tracts in any way you want by adding new nodes between start and end points, which you cannot do here. Instead, you can just raise or lower the track, with no control over how aggressively/smoothly it bends. Connecting longer distances also often end up creating unnecessary bridges and tunnels that can be avoided by manually laying smaller tracks/roads.
My other grime with the game is its Campaign. Usually games add a campaign to provide tutorials to new players. In this game, they have included an extensive, voice-acted campaign that only serves to scare away new players by torturing them to boredom. Thankfully I skipped the campaign at the start and went direct to Free Game mode as I knew what to expect, but I was utterly disappointed when I eventually decided to check out the campaign. Most of the time, you just click at things with a question mark over them, sometimes you are supposed to do something with them, like collect herbs, prevent meetings in houses... most of which means bulldoze things, but it is never explicitly mentioned. On top of that, the game doesn’t always register when you do things you are asked to do. At one point, they ask you to deliver truck loads of steel to make a special bra for a Hollywood actress... that’s how dumb the campaign missions are. Looking at the forum, I’d be surprised if anyone successfully completed the campaign without ever getting stuck. The cargo chains in the campaign also don’t often make sense and do not conform to the base game, and you are often making and breaking lines, waiting in-between to beat the counter. You hardly learn any tricks that will help you in the long run.
If you are new to the game, watch a YouTube video or a guide and jump straight into free game without getting fed up with the campaign. Considering the devs are probably already working on their next game, I’d request them to not waste resources on badly designed campaigns that scare away new players and instead focus more on the management aspect of the game. Even much smaller scale games like Rise of Industry have AI competitors and quest generation that make the gameplay more engaging. With all that said, it is still the best game to simulate realistic transport networks that work like clockwork once you set up properly.