Hello. I am active in public transport and am a fan of trams and buses myself, so I was really interested in a new game in this field. I have played many transport company games, have done a few vehicles for Transport tycoon patch concerning public transport (trams, buses), I lead a website about public transport in Slovakia ( www.mestskadoprava.net ). I will therefore try to use all my experience to review this game.
The game has a wonderful design and graphics, a little similar to Traffic giant, what was actually why I decided to buy the game. I have bought the game through Steam, as that was the easiest and started to play. I have chosen Wien, as I live in Bratislava and am rather close to Wien and even know the city and it's public transport itself.
The user interface is easy and can be quickly understood. The reputation bar is nice, but it doesn't seem to show the satisfaction of the people, as one can have green reputation and in the review at the end of the year gets a Poor in the customer review.
The build menu in the center upper part. I really miss the possibility to build sidewalks and roads. After one destroys a sidewalk, a fence, or a tree, one can't plant/build/finance it back. Without the possibility of building/financing the building of roads, many lines have to be far longer then they would have to be. The building of tram tracks is terrible and really complicated. The streets are done as sectors and because there is no real grid, the sections on one side of a block of houses can be different then on the other block, what makes building of tram tracks not in roads pretty complicated and often shows, that it is completely impossible without destroying the houses. It is mostly disturbing, when one has already built a track through a sidewalk and suddenly finds out, there is no way how to make a crossing with a street on the other side.
The stops are another weakness of this game. One can build several types of stops or stations - for each type of transport a different stop. What is really weird, a bus CAN'T use a bus stop and a tram CAN'T use a bus stop, despite the fact, that for example in Wien, which is one of the four cities used in the game, it's commonly used this way ! The result is obvious - one has to do a lot more stops then it is needed and getting from bus to tram is a lot more complicated. In addition, changing a line from bus to tram due to the fact there are too many passengers using the line is completely impossible ! The same problem is with changing a bus stop with sign to a bus stop with shelter. It is impossible - one has to delete the former stop and to do so, one has to STOP the entire line to take the stop away from the schedule, or it is not possible to delete the stop. This requests from the player to build the best stops which are available, as it is easier, then later destroying the less equipped stops and stopping a line, what of course isn't appreciated by the passengers.
The bulldoze tool has a few negatives as well. If you have built a tram track and put a tram stop on it and decided that the place is not good, if you try to bulldoze the tram stop, in most cases you have to bulldoze the tram track first. It is really very interesting to see tram stops on a street without tram tracks, mostly, when you actually can't build a tram stop on a place, when there are no tracks.
Let's have a look at the left menu. The first option is a cylinder, the company headquarters.
The budget. The budget does not show the actual numbers, only the numbers of the last month. One has no real numbers to work with until the end of month. But one can get used to it. What amazes me are the fines. I haven't found a way, how to setup their height for example. Maintenance is also quite... interesting. While you have maintenance on bus stops, you have absolutely no maintenance on tram/metro tracks, what makes these kinds of transport relatively cheap.
I will skip the Banks option, as that is not really interesting. Banks work good here and as long as one knows how much can afford to spend on monthly payments (from the budget menu), it is a good thing to use loans. The Energy menu is a bit dull, I, for example would love to know the energy consumption of lines compared to the count of passengers, so that I know which line is effective or not.
Company policy. As there is no money from the town or country, It is only you, who setups how many the tickets cost. Here one can see the problem, that the budget does not show the actual numbers, or at least an estimate, as it isn't easy to setup the ideal height of the ticket price. The other problem is the vehicle maintenance. One would think, that with moving the counter to 95 %, there should be almost no breakdowns. That would be nice. But it's not true. I had this set up to 80% and 4 of 5 buses broke down at once... Those breakdowns are a pain in the ass in this game. Stop/Station maintenance makes the stops attractive. I would think a clean stop helps the customers to a better mood while waiting for the bus, but it doesn't seem so. The same it seems to be with better equipped stops. There is unfortunately no help or hint about it here. No hint is present at the employees section as well, so I can only guess, that if you pay them enough, they do their work better... but what effects it may have remains a mystery for me.
The advertising section is easily understandable and the advertising campaigns are logical. They affect different classes of people and it results in higher reputation.
The last option here are the Customer profiles. This is a real mystery, as this field is completely empty and seems to be without any use.
Vehicle shop. The vehicle shop allows you to buy vehicles of any types into a fictional depot (as you don't have to buy or build any infrastructure). It has a capacity of 6 vehicles of any mean of transportation. The buying and selling of vehicles is being done through arrows.
Line panel. The line panel allows to create/cancel a line, start or stop it's service, adding stops on the line and manage the vehicles. There are a lot of problems with this. When you create a line, you add stops, till you make it closed (you add stops and as the last one you add the first one). You have to add a vehicle to be able to start a line. Anyhow the problem begins with adding vehicles. If you add more of them, and presume they will divide through the whole line evenly, that's a mistake. They add one behind another on the next stop. So if you add four buses, the first adds on the bus stop number 1 and the next ones add on the three following stops. You also can't decide, where the vehicle will be added. I have logically tried to click on the stop, where I wanted it to start, but the attempt was futile. So this is a great minus for the game.
Also, if you want to change the line some, adding a few stops, you have every time to click on the following stop in the list, before which you want the next one to add, as after the addition, the next would be added at the end. Any change to the line of course requires the line to go off service, vehicles ejecting all the passengers, which are then unsatisfied - in reality the changes do not occur this way and I understand that here the time goes rather fast, but this way any change cause huge unsatisfaction with the service. The only way to see, what is the profit the line does is to see all the vehicles, and, again, the data is not actual. I really miss some group information about the count of breakdowns, % use of vehicle capacity, informations what part of the line is most used, etc.
I have no real comments to the Graphs section, but I miss a large feature in the Roster. Here you can see / compare the vehicles you use. This is the only place, where you can predict the breakdowns... And you have no mean to repair them before they break down... That is really ugly...
Gameplay. What shocked me most was the amount of passengers the vehicles could transport. Without the vehicle capacity mod the game was almost unplayable. I have managed to bankrupt seven times before I have installed the mod. The game runs smoothly, but with faster time and more vehicles it starts to lag. Several times I experienced a weird bug, when a vehicle took more passengers then it's capacity was. It was usually after a breakdown. Another negative feature are people standing on both sidewalks next to a street. A bus stops, starts taking in the people and till they get on the other side of the street, the bus goes away without taking them. Maybe the payment of the driver has an influence on this, but I have no proof of that. The system is not dynamic enough, if two lines have the same route, and a passenger has his way set up, he should be able to choose the line, which comes first. A catastrophy is the traffic, which remains the same level despite your efforts. I have transported more and more passengers every year, the traffic was still bad.
Another absolutely crazy thing is the expansion of the city, as it expands even despite the fact you have tracks and lines in the area, where the buildings should be build. I would at least expect to be told that I should remove infrastructure from that zone. Not that one day the tram will stop at the foot of a building...
I have tried to play a town, created in the map editor, and wasn't able to. I think this should be easy, people, who buy a game don't have to be IT engineers to search, rewrite files, folders, etc...
What has to be said is, that the choice of vehicles is very poor. Around 30 vehicles of 5 means of transport for 100 year history is really poor. Of one looks to the history of any transport company which works for 100 years, one could see, what I mean. An example from Bratislava - a city, where public transport started in 1895. During this time, Bratislava had 13 types of trams with additional 4 types of non-motorized carriages, 9 types of trolley-buses, around 20 types of buses... And I am talking about a country of eastern block, where many types were build for 10-15 years. I was pretty disappointed by this. BTW... In the whole Europe Articulated buses are prefered over doubbledeckers. Is there a reason, why there is so few articulated buses and the Pavlov extended has a 60% chance of breakdown ?!
I also miss any communication with the city. The city offers a few financial compensations, if you're in red numbers, but no real solutions for a better transportation.
I still like the game, but it is very simplistic, with many unsolved issues.
Graphics/engine: 9/10
Gameplay: 6/10
Realistics: 6/10
=================
Final score : 7/10
ISSUES THAT NEED TO BE SOLVED :
1) Upgrade of bus/tram stops without the need of destroy the former ones and placing a new ones
2) Compatibility of tram and bus stops
3) Allow upgrading lines from bus to tram and from tram to bus
4) Solve issues of Break downs - reduce breakdown rate of Pavlov extended bus, enable servicing of vehicles when their state drops below xy %, to not allow those breakdowns, make a service button in the rooster
5) make traffic dynamic - the more passengers you transport, the less cars there are out, make the traffic raise through the time from 1920 near 0% to 2020 near xy % and then substract the amount of passengers transported by public transport.
6) Make it easier to use maps created and shared by other people through the net
7) After stopping a line, the faces on the stops sometimes get stuck and remain unhappy even when there is no one waiting, or after renewing the line even when there is only a green face after moving the cursor on the stop
8) Change adding vehicles to lines - on the stop on which you clicked in the line schedule. Vehicle should start on the stop it starts and take those passengers as well !!!!!
9) Buldoze should destroy primarilly tram stops, only then the tracks. It should not allow to destroy track on which a tram line is already in service
10) More informations about lines, etc., as stated in text
The game has a wonderful design and graphics, a little similar to Traffic giant, what was actually why I decided to buy the game. I have bought the game through Steam, as that was the easiest and started to play. I have chosen Wien, as I live in Bratislava and am rather close to Wien and even know the city and it's public transport itself.
The user interface is easy and can be quickly understood. The reputation bar is nice, but it doesn't seem to show the satisfaction of the people, as one can have green reputation and in the review at the end of the year gets a Poor in the customer review.
The build menu in the center upper part. I really miss the possibility to build sidewalks and roads. After one destroys a sidewalk, a fence, or a tree, one can't plant/build/finance it back. Without the possibility of building/financing the building of roads, many lines have to be far longer then they would have to be. The building of tram tracks is terrible and really complicated. The streets are done as sectors and because there is no real grid, the sections on one side of a block of houses can be different then on the other block, what makes building of tram tracks not in roads pretty complicated and often shows, that it is completely impossible without destroying the houses. It is mostly disturbing, when one has already built a track through a sidewalk and suddenly finds out, there is no way how to make a crossing with a street on the other side.
The stops are another weakness of this game. One can build several types of stops or stations - for each type of transport a different stop. What is really weird, a bus CAN'T use a bus stop and a tram CAN'T use a bus stop, despite the fact, that for example in Wien, which is one of the four cities used in the game, it's commonly used this way ! The result is obvious - one has to do a lot more stops then it is needed and getting from bus to tram is a lot more complicated. In addition, changing a line from bus to tram due to the fact there are too many passengers using the line is completely impossible ! The same problem is with changing a bus stop with sign to a bus stop with shelter. It is impossible - one has to delete the former stop and to do so, one has to STOP the entire line to take the stop away from the schedule, or it is not possible to delete the stop. This requests from the player to build the best stops which are available, as it is easier, then later destroying the less equipped stops and stopping a line, what of course isn't appreciated by the passengers.
The bulldoze tool has a few negatives as well. If you have built a tram track and put a tram stop on it and decided that the place is not good, if you try to bulldoze the tram stop, in most cases you have to bulldoze the tram track first. It is really very interesting to see tram stops on a street without tram tracks, mostly, when you actually can't build a tram stop on a place, when there are no tracks.
Let's have a look at the left menu. The first option is a cylinder, the company headquarters.
The budget. The budget does not show the actual numbers, only the numbers of the last month. One has no real numbers to work with until the end of month. But one can get used to it. What amazes me are the fines. I haven't found a way, how to setup their height for example. Maintenance is also quite... interesting. While you have maintenance on bus stops, you have absolutely no maintenance on tram/metro tracks, what makes these kinds of transport relatively cheap.
I will skip the Banks option, as that is not really interesting. Banks work good here and as long as one knows how much can afford to spend on monthly payments (from the budget menu), it is a good thing to use loans. The Energy menu is a bit dull, I, for example would love to know the energy consumption of lines compared to the count of passengers, so that I know which line is effective or not.
Company policy. As there is no money from the town or country, It is only you, who setups how many the tickets cost. Here one can see the problem, that the budget does not show the actual numbers, or at least an estimate, as it isn't easy to setup the ideal height of the ticket price. The other problem is the vehicle maintenance. One would think, that with moving the counter to 95 %, there should be almost no breakdowns. That would be nice. But it's not true. I had this set up to 80% and 4 of 5 buses broke down at once... Those breakdowns are a pain in the ass in this game. Stop/Station maintenance makes the stops attractive. I would think a clean stop helps the customers to a better mood while waiting for the bus, but it doesn't seem so. The same it seems to be with better equipped stops. There is unfortunately no help or hint about it here. No hint is present at the employees section as well, so I can only guess, that if you pay them enough, they do their work better... but what effects it may have remains a mystery for me.
The advertising section is easily understandable and the advertising campaigns are logical. They affect different classes of people and it results in higher reputation.
The last option here are the Customer profiles. This is a real mystery, as this field is completely empty and seems to be without any use.
Vehicle shop. The vehicle shop allows you to buy vehicles of any types into a fictional depot (as you don't have to buy or build any infrastructure). It has a capacity of 6 vehicles of any mean of transportation. The buying and selling of vehicles is being done through arrows.
Line panel. The line panel allows to create/cancel a line, start or stop it's service, adding stops on the line and manage the vehicles. There are a lot of problems with this. When you create a line, you add stops, till you make it closed (you add stops and as the last one you add the first one). You have to add a vehicle to be able to start a line. Anyhow the problem begins with adding vehicles. If you add more of them, and presume they will divide through the whole line evenly, that's a mistake. They add one behind another on the next stop. So if you add four buses, the first adds on the bus stop number 1 and the next ones add on the three following stops. You also can't decide, where the vehicle will be added. I have logically tried to click on the stop, where I wanted it to start, but the attempt was futile. So this is a great minus for the game.
Also, if you want to change the line some, adding a few stops, you have every time to click on the following stop in the list, before which you want the next one to add, as after the addition, the next would be added at the end. Any change to the line of course requires the line to go off service, vehicles ejecting all the passengers, which are then unsatisfied - in reality the changes do not occur this way and I understand that here the time goes rather fast, but this way any change cause huge unsatisfaction with the service. The only way to see, what is the profit the line does is to see all the vehicles, and, again, the data is not actual. I really miss some group information about the count of breakdowns, % use of vehicle capacity, informations what part of the line is most used, etc.
I have no real comments to the Graphs section, but I miss a large feature in the Roster. Here you can see / compare the vehicles you use. This is the only place, where you can predict the breakdowns... And you have no mean to repair them before they break down... That is really ugly...
Gameplay. What shocked me most was the amount of passengers the vehicles could transport. Without the vehicle capacity mod the game was almost unplayable. I have managed to bankrupt seven times before I have installed the mod. The game runs smoothly, but with faster time and more vehicles it starts to lag. Several times I experienced a weird bug, when a vehicle took more passengers then it's capacity was. It was usually after a breakdown. Another negative feature are people standing on both sidewalks next to a street. A bus stops, starts taking in the people and till they get on the other side of the street, the bus goes away without taking them. Maybe the payment of the driver has an influence on this, but I have no proof of that. The system is not dynamic enough, if two lines have the same route, and a passenger has his way set up, he should be able to choose the line, which comes first. A catastrophy is the traffic, which remains the same level despite your efforts. I have transported more and more passengers every year, the traffic was still bad.
Another absolutely crazy thing is the expansion of the city, as it expands even despite the fact you have tracks and lines in the area, where the buildings should be build. I would at least expect to be told that I should remove infrastructure from that zone. Not that one day the tram will stop at the foot of a building...
I have tried to play a town, created in the map editor, and wasn't able to. I think this should be easy, people, who buy a game don't have to be IT engineers to search, rewrite files, folders, etc...
What has to be said is, that the choice of vehicles is very poor. Around 30 vehicles of 5 means of transport for 100 year history is really poor. Of one looks to the history of any transport company which works for 100 years, one could see, what I mean. An example from Bratislava - a city, where public transport started in 1895. During this time, Bratislava had 13 types of trams with additional 4 types of non-motorized carriages, 9 types of trolley-buses, around 20 types of buses... And I am talking about a country of eastern block, where many types were build for 10-15 years. I was pretty disappointed by this. BTW... In the whole Europe Articulated buses are prefered over doubbledeckers. Is there a reason, why there is so few articulated buses and the Pavlov extended has a 60% chance of breakdown ?!
I also miss any communication with the city. The city offers a few financial compensations, if you're in red numbers, but no real solutions for a better transportation.
I still like the game, but it is very simplistic, with many unsolved issues.
Graphics/engine: 9/10
Gameplay: 6/10
Realistics: 6/10
=================
Final score : 7/10
ISSUES THAT NEED TO BE SOLVED :
1) Upgrade of bus/tram stops without the need of destroy the former ones and placing a new ones
2) Compatibility of tram and bus stops
3) Allow upgrading lines from bus to tram and from tram to bus
4) Solve issues of Break downs - reduce breakdown rate of Pavlov extended bus, enable servicing of vehicles when their state drops below xy %, to not allow those breakdowns, make a service button in the rooster
5) make traffic dynamic - the more passengers you transport, the less cars there are out, make the traffic raise through the time from 1920 near 0% to 2020 near xy % and then substract the amount of passengers transported by public transport.
6) Make it easier to use maps created and shared by other people through the net
7) After stopping a line, the faces on the stops sometimes get stuck and remain unhappy even when there is no one waiting, or after renewing the line even when there is only a green face after moving the cursor on the stop
8) Change adding vehicles to lines - on the stop on which you clicked in the line schedule. Vehicle should start on the stop it starts and take those passengers as well !!!!!
9) Buldoze should destroy primarilly tram stops, only then the tracks. It should not allow to destroy track on which a tram line is already in service
10) More informations about lines, etc., as stated in text
