Transport Giant

If you like hardcore sim games then Transport Giant could be the game for you. It takes what games such as Industry Giant II did to a whole new level. You are tasked with building the ultimate transport infrastructure. This is the kind of thing that sounds easy at first, but this is a game that is super dense and it will require your ultimate dedication if you are going to get into it.

It’s Logistics

The premise of the game is that you need to operate your own logistics company. You need to expand your business so that it can grow all over the map and you can reach to the furthest areas. Just when you have it figured out and you start making massive profits, rivals will start to pop up and you have to rethink your strategy. I really cannot overstate how hard Transport Giant is!

The presentation of the game in screenshots and on videos I know looks very basic, but this is by design. These basic visuals allowed the developers to show you the area your logistics company is operating in, on a truly grand scale.

Wait, What???

The learning curve that this game has is one of the steepest I have ever come across. I actually restarted my game three times due to not quite “getting it” when I was starting out. The game does have a tutorial and the campaign eases you in. However, there are a ton of menus that you have to work through in Transport Giant and I can see many people getting very frustrated and flat out bored before they really get into what makes this game so much fun.

The Good Old Days

The grand scale of Transport Giant is one of the things that I liked best about it. The game starts in 1850 and you are tasked with building a company and keeping it going for 200 years. This means that new areas will be built and of course, new technologies will arise and you need to be at the forefront of these to make sure that your company is the one that is thriving.

The amount of ways you can transport people and supplies is insane in this game. Through the ages, you will be making use of things like trains, ships, aircraft, and much more. The campaigns that you play through give you may interesting challenges and it is always interesting to move to the next “era” to see what you have available to you.

Pros:

• The game takes you through 200 years of logistics history
• I like the scaled back visual style
• Plenty of vehicles for you to use
• The game is very addictive when you get the hang of it
• The challenge it offers is immense

Cons:

• The learning curve may be too steep
• The first few hours may make or break the game for you

Despite going down like a lead balloon in Britain, the Germans loved 2000's Traffic Giant. The premise of the game was simple: turn a suburban sprawl into an efficient model of public transport and make the trains run on time. So, with the inevitability that night follows day, the developer has now come up with a sequel: Transport Giant.

The game is similar to Chris Sawyer's 1994 masterpiece Transport Tycoon. In TG though, rather than micro-managing cities, you develop a full transport infrastructure for a country, while making a fat profit from shipping freight and passengers. However, unlike its classic inspiration, this rendition falls flat on its arse.

For starters, there are big issues with pathing, Al and basic sanity. Road transport seems incapable of overtaking slower traffic, so new HGVs find themselves driving from London to Glasgow at 10mph, stuck behind a horse and cart.

Then there's the trains. You can toil for hours creating a fantastic train network, only for the computer to turn them 180-degrees (for no apparent reason), straight into the path of oncoming trains. And we won't even go into the logic-defying shipping system...

However, what really gets our goat is that all this could've been avoided with a few design tweaks. Transport Giant should have been an engrossing game; in its current state though, it's just a giant pain in the arse.