Tram Simulator Urban Transit review

There is something peaceful about simulator games that keep me coming back again. For many years it was Train Simulator but in the past year Bus Simulator has grabbed my attention. I was really please to see the team recently announce their latest venture in the form of Tram Simulator, before I knew it the game was released and I was really looking forward to trying it it out.

In Tram Simulator Urban Transit, players have three different game modes to choose from, Story, Career, and Sandbox mode. I naturally began my Tram Simulator journey here. You work with local business owners and prominent members of society to meet objectives across 10 different missions. They all follow a similar pattern, creating routes, transporting passengers and levelling up areas.

One of my criticism of Bus simulator was the slight messy nature of creating routes, the map was a bit too simplistic and I found it difficult to do simple things. Unfortunately not much has changed here as the interface is exactly the same.  I did notice on earlier missions that the game helped you find specific stops on the map but after the first mission that stopped again. I’d love to be able to access a list broken down by area to help me when planning routes.

As you progress through the story you unlock new areas to explore and of course new trams to drive. I enjoyed being able to drive some heritage vehicles to give customers guided tours of Angel Shores, but I preferred driving the more modern trams overall. Both types of Tram were simple to to drive but if you are struggling there is a driver training mode to learn before you hit the city.

As you drive around the city you are able to manually swap points depending on your route, I often forgotten to change them and ended up giving my customers detours, it would be great if you could build in an automatic system that you could override. The majority of my time in story mode was levelling up districts which basically involved driving and stopping at stops, the more time you complete stops the quicker you can upgrade the stops. I spent about 10 hours on the story and enjoyed the challenge of the different objectives.

In Career mode, players can start their tram company without any guidelines and expand it as much as their funds allow it, this was the most fun part of the game and the mode you will spend most of your time on. The final mode, Sandbox, is great for casual players as you have unlimited funds and everything is unlocked for you to freely play the game as you please.

Graphically for the most part the game looks good, however the trams feel a little clunky when approaching corners and the people around the city move in an unnatural way which ruins the immersion. The city is vibrant with interesting points of interest from the inner city with its big buildings to the suburbs with local shops and lakes. The Trams themselves look excellent with great detail put in to ensuring they look as realistic as possible.

The Audio is also good, the authentic trams sounds are excellent as are the general noises of the city, the only thing that lets the game down is the tedious dialogue from the passengers. I’d much rather just hear the hum of passengers from outside of my cab rather than clear audio from them. It bugged me with Bus Simulator and it’s no different here.