I grew up playing the classic Sim games from Maxis. We had Sim Life on our Amiga 1200 and I later grew so obsessed with my Sim Ant game on our first PC that I did an elementary school science project using the game manual as a resource (hey, the back of the book was basically a biology textbook about real ants; it was legitimate research).
Since those days, sim games have grown far more sophisticated just as I have grown away from them, but when I was offered the chance to play with the latest edition of Transport Tycoon I was interested to see how the game would compare to my memories.
Transport Tycoon is a classic in its own right and was originally released in 1994 (I can clearly remember seeing that box on the shelves of my local games store when I was a kid). The game allows players to build up a transport empire of road, rail, sea, and air transportation, beginning in the 1900s and progressing through time to the modern day. The iPad app features a number of different scenarios to be played through at different levels of difficulty. Easy scenarios can be as “simple” as carrying 1000 passengers within ten years, expert challenges include attaining monthly profits of £1 million, and finishing the game as the top company against up to 14 rivals.
I actually found the game quite hard to get into. Setting up bus routes in existing towns was simple enough but the process of laying out railway track between towns felt tedious and overly complicated compared with games I’ve played in the past. The grainy “retro” feel to the graphics combined with the slightly clumsy touch screen interaction made the game more difficult than it should have been simply because of the visuals. At one point I struggled to understand why a bus route wasn’t working. It took some considerable effort to spot that a section of road was pointing the wrong way so the bus couldn’t travel along it. Rather than giving me a warning error to explain that the route was impossible, the bus just trundled around in an endless loop visiting the same single stop over and over.
That being said, I still found myself playing for longer than I intended, getting sucked into watching the little profit counter steadily increasing as I expanded my bus empire into more and more cities (I’d given up on trains at this point–the track seemed too expensive to invest in). My four-year-old son would happily sit beside me wanting to watch the little vehicles zooming about on their errands. He found it fascinating and I even found him attempting to play the game on more than one occasion, despite it being far too complex for his age.
I wouldn’t be rushing out to purchase Transport Tycoon if this had just been a demo. For me these games have become too complex. I enjoyed the basic gameplay of the early sim games (my last copy of Sim City was nothing more than a grid) rather than the constant micro-management required of modern variants. Interestingly, my husband feels the same way about current football manager games.
But there’s no doubt that Transport Tycoon is a well-built game with a lot packed into its meager $7 (£5) price tag. If you’re prepared to invest the time then you will definitely reap what you sow.
GeekMom received this item for review purposes.
