Tram Simulator: Urban Transit by developer Stillalive studios puts you in the drivers seat of a public transport business, set in the fictional town of Angel Shores in America. There are two main modes to choose from, simulation and relax, as well as multiplayer.
There is also a driving school mode which I would recommend doing before you set about building your new company. While it teaches you the controls for driving the trams, it more importantly teaches you to watch your speed and stay below the limits, use indictors when turning, dropping off passengers or pulling away from stops and to stop at red lights. These and more are all things that will affect your income in the story and career modes.
You start off by making a character. The character creation options are very limited, with few choices in each category for both physical appearance and clothing, but you won’t see him/her much anyway except when changing trams. Once you have a character you can start a new game by picking between the two modes and creating a company. The relax mode is forgiving on your driving, while simulation is realistic and unforgiving. In both modes you get the choice of playing three further game modes, the story, career and sandbox. Story includes missions, limited money and unlockable vehicles, stops and customisation options to begin with. Career begins with all of those unlocked and limited money, and sandbox is the same as career but with unlimited money.
So I started with the story mode in simulation. A character called Tony gives you your missions to help build up the company and improve public transport across the city. The first mission is to create a small route linking specific stops and then drive that route, picking up passengers and dropping them off. You only have one tram to choose from in the beginning out of three different types to buy, you unlock the others and the variants of each as the story progresses and you complete more missions.
Driving the tram itself is easy, you accelerate and decelerate with the triggers, indicators are the shoulder buttons and turn left or right when the track splits with the left thumb stick, your direction is indicated by a green line when there is a choice. There is a learning curve though on managing your speed, as you don’t hold the triggers to drive or brake like driving a car in other games. You have an acceleration bar and a deceleration bar, the more the bar is filled the faster you will pick up speed or brake and you have to learn to balance the two to drive correctly. The speed limit in the city is 30 mph and up to 50 mph everywhere else. If you regularly go above the limit or stay above it you will be fined and your passengers will complain, on the other hand if you fail to stop in the correct position at a tram stop, either stopping too far past it or before it, it will also affect your score from the passengers come payday, as will taking corners without slowing down.
As you drive your routes you will see a type of approval bar increase or decrease when you do things, like indicating when turning, stopping to pick people up or leaving a stop. Stopping close to the stop to let people on or off and doing little things that pop up like asking a passenger to turn their loud music down or waking a passenger up before the end of the route will all increase your approval. Your approval will decrease if you fail to do these things and you can also be fined for other things like driving through red lights, speeding and hitting vehicles or people crossing. At the end of the route you get an income report showing what vehicle and route you have driven, how much you have earned and any deductions from fines and repairs. Your approval is shown by a 5 star review, which then increases your income accordingly. As well as buying more trams or customising the ones you have, you can use your money to upgrade stops while driving a route, this is actually a target in most missions. The higher level a stop, the more you will earn, and if you increase the level of stops in a specific part of town the level of that area will also increase, improving the quality of transport in the city.
As you advance in the story the missions will become more complex, you will be asked to create balanced routes or routes during peak times, night or day, connecting certain stops. Stops will have either a plus or minus 1 on them when asked to do make a balanced route and you will have to create a route that connects the required stops along with others that has an equal number of plus and minus stops. For a route at peak times the stops will have either an early morning, daytime or night symbols on them. Once you have unlocked at least one other tram you can also begin to create routes and have them be driven for you while also driving your own route.
The three vehicle types all have their own characteristics and feel different to drive. You can customise them by changing the colour of the exterior as well as the pattern on the seats, you can put a wrap on it with different designs and even put advertisements on the sides which can earn you more money. This of course all costs money, but they do look good when you change your view to the outside of the vehicle. Each of the vehicles has a different interior in the cab, though all of them will show a map with your route on it and your speed on the left hand side next to your acceleration indicator, the rest of the interior is purely cosmetic. I thought that was a missed opportunity personally. To activate things like your windscreen wipers and the ramp for disabled users you have to open a radial menu instead of being able to push the buttons that are in front of you in the cab.
Visually the game is pleasing, though I find in simulation you don’t get the chance to really look at your surroundings often, if you are concentrating on the road, which is a realistic aspect of driving that anyone who drives in real life will know. That said though, you can look around between missions where you can free roam, though there isn’t a great deal of variation in the city to behold. There are some parts that stand out, driving across a bridge over water during a sunset is a very pretty sight every time.
