TL;DR: Free game is many hours of solid fun. Stay away from the campaign.

Transport Fever 2 is a game about building up a transport system of different goods and travelers. It's not unlike Cities: Skylines, only not at all, because it doesn't feature any of the actual city building. Instead, you control transport between cities and industries and you can grow cities by fulfilling their needs. It's traffic management and public transport cranked up to 11, and I really enjoy those aspects in C:S.

There are two fundamental game modes: Free play, and the campaign.

Free play starts you on a map with money in a time era of your choosing, and your job is to make more by building transportation. It offers you a nice challenge combined with the freedom of doing whatever you want on a large map. Watching trains pick up goods does tickle my brain in a way that makes it easy to lose hours upon hours playing the same map. I especially like how the gameplay leads you to naturally build on what you already have - once you have rails and a train going, it becomes easier to transport more things than what you originally built that rail for on it. No need to reinvent the road when you already have one.

The campaign consists of levels with missions to complete and seems to have missed everything about what makes this game fun. In theory, being given missions in different historical settings seems like an alright idea, but in reality it's a handholdy slog that takes away all your freedom and serves poorly as a tutorial since there are fundamental things it doesn't properly explain. Do you like waiting for a number to tick up with nothing to do in the meantime (except the occasional bonus mission) because you don't know what the game wants you to do afterwards? When playing free game, you are sometimes limited by money and need to wait to earn more, but at least YOU get to make decisions in how to earn that money back, and YOU decide what you want to do wih it afterwards. Quite often the campaign just wants you to wait for a train to go from point A to point B. Money is never an object, either, so it takes away all of the challenge.

I did still enjoy myself a lot when playing free game, which is why I do recommend this game, but completing the campain for 100% achievements felt like a chore. Don't bother.

(PS: If you do buy this game, here is some fundamental knowledge the game is very bad at conveying: Industries produce to match the NEED of the places you are delivering to, and you make money depending on HOW FAR you have transported the goods/people. It's going to help you a lot to think of this, trust me.)

I like trains

This game really made me wonder: Is Transport Tycoon, at this point a 25 (!) year old game, indeed such an incredible achievement that no other game will ever come close to it? This one didn't even really try. The graphics are just that - a modern tileset that creates rather nice environments