I didn’t expect to kidnap alligators, save Woodstock or give people dysentery in a game called Transport Fever 3—but here we are

The humble transport management sim is a venerable, fundamental part of PC gaming that’s been inspiring an obsession with logistics since the early ’90s. It can be complex, sometimes fiddly, but frequently rewarding work, linking up people, towns and businesses through roads and railways. But it can also come across as a wee bit dry—at least if you’re not one of the enlightened who realises that it is, in fact, extremely cool.

Transport Fever 3 begins with a mission to kidnap some alligators.

Hunting alligators serves as a simple, brief camera control tutorial in the first of Transport Fever 3’s eight campaign missions. You simply click on the reptiles until you’ve found them all, and then you release them back into the wild (off screen). It’s not a particularly noteworthy escapade, except that it’s a very silly way to begin a transport sim campaign—I kinda love it.

There’s not much call for animal wrangling after that, at least in the two missions I’ve played, but it establishes developer Urban Games’ desire to add a dash of personality and playfulness to a genre that is otherwise usually eager to just get down to business, plonking down depots, warehouses and roads to connect the world. Don’t worry—that’s still Transport Fever 3’s main focus, but it’s accompanied by a more flavourful layer.

Previous Transport Fever games also included campaigns, but the focus was always on the history of transportation. This time around, there’s a lot more general history, with developer Urban Games figuring out how to connect that to the history of transportation. So you might not think about logistics and transportation networks when you consider New Orleans and Mardi Gras, but without logistical planning and fleets of vehicles, such festivals wouldn’t exist.

Talking heads

A cast of chatty characters dole out missions and bicker away between your tasks, giving each challenge a human face. They represent different viewpoints and sides of moments across history, like saving Mardi Gras following a storm in 1906, or setting up Woodstock in 1969. There are hints of conflict or the odd culture clash between the cast as they approach you for a blether, but it’s all pretty tame. It’s not the most scintillating banter, then, but the missions they give you are the main attraction.

Transport Fever 3’s campaign missions benefit from the additional human context. Take my attempt to put on Woodstock, for instance. Because I’d transported a lot of food to the small campsite, it started to grow, spreading out as more people came for delicious grub and the promise of good tunes. Unfortunately, these people had nowhere to poop. A crisis!

After setting up some toilets, a new problem reared its head: what to do with all the poo. Woodstock’s producer just told me to dump it in the nearby river, and feeling confident I could shield myself from any unfortunate side effects of this decision by claiming I was just doing my job, I dumped several tonnes of feces into the water. I was shocked when bathers started to get sick.

So I started transporting the waste to a sewage plant, and then I was tasked with bringing medicine to the camp, which continued to grow, and I had a set time to do it in. This proved to be a particularly fun challenge as it forced me to actually think about the most efficient method of transportation.

See, you have all sorts of transportation options, limited only by the historical era. Every vehicle has a specific weight it can carry, along with top speed, how noisy it is, how comfy it is to sit in, and so on, all of which will determine the best solution to any particular task. But there are other factors to consider: how far away is the vehicle depot, what’s the traffic like, how robust is your road or rail network? You might have the perfect vehicle for the job, but that means diddly squat when the main thoroughfare is blocked by traffic jams or your vehicles have to come from miles away.

The map’s development is also a factor. A once quiet road you could have sent fleets of trucks down in 1920 could eventually become a city’s main artery by the ’50s, as settlements organically grow based on what sorts of goods you’re transporting around. This will not only make it harder to transport goods through that road, it could also create issues for the folks living in the area, whose air is now clogged with pollution.

Road warrior

Issues like this can stifle the growth of a city, so your concerns go beyond making money and transporting goods; you need to think about your impact on the environment and the settlements you service. The good news is you have a lot more fine control over things like roads than in previous games, allowing you to design them in such a way that you can ease the impact of dense traffic. In this way, Transport Fever 3 feels more holistic than its predecessors and emphasises Urban Games’ main objective with this sequel: to include more tycoon-style gameplay, rather than just getting you to build transport networks.

Essentially, this just means more opportunities for players to make decisions and then live with the consequences. As most of the game’s components are interconnected, most of what you do will echo through its other systems, forcing you to plan and then adapt.

While Transport Fever 3 looks beyond the pure logistics conundrums of its predecessors, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t made changes to the nitty gritty stuff. In Transport Fever 2, for instance, cargo was handled automatically, but this time around you’re going to be getting your hands dirty, determining what cargo goes where, and what vehicles are taking from businesses that contain different types of cargo.

These days, I typically prefer city builders over transport sims, but a couple of hours into Transport Fever 3 I remembered why I used to spend an inordinate amount of time tweaking routes and trying to bleed more money out of my haulage operations. I am not ashamed to say that it’s genuinely exciting to watch my vehicles racing down motorways laden with cargo, and then see small villages transform into sprawling industrial powerhouses because of my efforts.

In the sandbox mode, which covers 1900-2030, the sense of achievement is more acute, as you witness the evolution of civilisation. Horse-drawn wagons and cargo trams eventually make way for high-speed trains and automobiles, and you can even watch as the fully simulated citizens you serve change, not just in their look, but in their behaviour. In 1900, they might have no option but to use your trains to get across the map, but in the ’60s everyone’s got a car to get around in, creating more road traffic and reducing their reliance on your network, in turn encouraging you to create more bus stops and passenger transport options.

But sometimes it’s the little things that matter most. Painting my trucks a new colour, for instance. Or hopping into a vehicle and just getting taken for a ride, gazing out the window at the world I helped create. And it’s a good thing I enjoy these calm moments, because the game has an atrocious top speed. It’s not as big an issue when you’ve got a dozen things to worry about, but in the more focused campaign you should expect to wait around a lot. Certainly enough time to make a coffee and put your feet up for a few minutes.

You’ll be able to get trucking when Transport Fever 3 launches later this year.