Trams. The trains of the streets. Once a staple of British cities, first as horsedrawn trams and eventually electricity as the dominant power method, the rise of the motorcar and busses (and even trolley busses) saw basically all of our tram tracks ripped up by the 1960s. Now they’re oddities with limited routes in Croydon, Manchester, Nottingham, Edinburgh and a few other cities in the UK.
Over on the continent, though? Well, Vienna’s trams are iconic, and there’s large networks in Cologne, Berlin, Milan, Budapest and beyond that never went away, living alongside busses, metros and trains. They often have the best of all worlds, serving inner cities, having large raised platforms, and minimal air pollution.
So anyway, trams are pretty neat if you’re a public transport user, and the team at ViewApp agree. A few years on from the TramSim games, they’ve now released City Transport Simulator: Tram, bringing the game out of Steam Early Access this week.
I’ll be honest, the simulator craze has largely passed me by, but I’ve got childhood memories of catching trams in Vienna or Budapest on holiday, and there’s always a tram ride or two each year at Gamescom. but City Transport Simulator: Tram doesn’t take you to any of the real cities. Instead, there’s the German/Austrian-like fictional city of Tramau.
As the intro cinematic tells you, this city has always had plenty of trams, but as the years have gone by, the network has lost some of its vim and vigour. So the mayor has bought trams from all over the world to turn Tramau into the living tram museum of a tram-lover’s dreams.
The career mode gives you the whole network of trams to manage, with limited resources to start that you need to build up as you craft a hustling, bustling public transport network, customising the tram liveries along the way. You’ll obviously be able to drive the trams as well, like you’re a CEO on Undercover Boss or something.
But you don’t have to engage with that management side of things if you’d rather just drive some trams. Once you’ve completed the tutorial that runs you through the basics, you can easily just pick a tram and route to drive, or have the game pick for you with a Quick Play option.
Driving a tram is pretty straightforward. You’re on tracks, so all you have to worry about there is setting the throttle, minding the speed limits and traffic lights (there’s tram-specific lights at many junctions), and coming to a stop for each station. You’ll quickly get the hang of pulling away from a station or junction, quickly toggling the throttle back to neutral to manage the top speed, and then slowing at the station to hit the mark. I do wish it was a little more naunced, though. Especially on keyboard, it feels very digital and having some additional throttle stops for 25% and 50% would help with that more graceful arrival into a station or maintaining a speed through a curve or hill.
I also wish there was a little more of a helping hand in certain key areas. You can settle for simplified controls that peel away needing to fuss with doors and signalling, but it would be great to have distant traffic lights highlighted and enlarged in the UI. You have the speed limits in the speedometer, and can zoom your view quite a lot, but I missed a bunch of overhead traffic lights on my first couple efforts.
The game has that rather clean and pristine look that you’ll be used to from simulator games, but aside from the trams that have been recreated in fine detail, I like the look of Tramau as a place. It really captures the feel of a European city, with the pastel rendered buildings, the blocks of buildings, the mix of classic architecture and modern flat faces, the narrower streets, the way that tram tracks and car lanes blend together and separate. It’s a great stand-in for the many cities that have these tram networks.
Of course, there’s a lot of Vienna that the game is trying to mimic. Depending on the version of the game you get – from £20 Standard Edition to the £40 Collector’s Edition – there’s up to 7 trams, and over half of them are from the Viennese network, including the modern vehicles and the classic E1, which looks as old and retro as you’d hope.
You’ll mainly be looking around the driver’s cabin of each, and there’s all the buttons and toggles that you’d expect. More than you’ll typically need, to be fair, so there’s interactive toggles for heating and defrosting the windscreen on the old E1. Mostly it’s just drive, signalling and managing the doors for people to get on and off. Also some quick camera view swaps from cockpit to passenger area and a follow cam.
Disappointingly, I ran into some slightly annoying bugs in my first little foray with the game. Setting a name for my person, I couldn’t call him ‘Stefan Strassenbahn’ getting a complaint about using special characters, even without the ß. But that’s fine. More frustrating were instances where the simulation broke down. At one semi-pedestrianised station, pedestrians would just walk into my stationary tram and clip through before disappearing into nothingness, so that every time I tried to drive off, I’d get a warning about hitting people. Coming to the final stop, all the traffic (including another tram up ahead of me) was completely stuck in place despite the lights cycling multiple times. Bored, I stepped out of the driver’s cabin, the tram started moving on its own, and I was clipped outside of it. Then the game crashed.
That’s more than a few rough edges that I’d have hoped the stint in Early Access would have helped to stamp out. It’s a shame, because what’s there feels like it should really appeal to tram and sim enthusiasts. With a few patches, this could still become a tram-filled paradise.