For an Early Access game this is pretty impressive. 12 hours in at this point.
Content is a tad light as yet but there's quite an engaging campaign to play already and overall there's much to like about it. Look and feel is about the same as its competitors like Railway Empire.

Track laying is easy and effective although so far it lacks good control of track height, hopefully that will come later. That aside if you accept that it does some quite heavy civil engineering (which can make routes cost more) it works well. Double track is easy, stations can have up to 5 tracks each although so far I've not found the need for more than 2. The height issue aside it's easily as good as its competition in the sector. Junctions and signalling work nicely.

Trains are not artificially limited to length which is a bugbear of many other similar titles. Each engine has a maximum tonnage it can haul, and you can have as many cars as you like. You can even overload them if you wish although that's not efficient.

There's a research department you can install in your head office, which allows a variety of upgrades which increase performance, plus of course researching bigger and better engines. Top of the tree so far appears to be the GG1 electric. It'd be nice if they filled out the tree a little, the number of engines currently is a bit low.

In addition to these things, you also have other departments you can install:
* lobbying: Lets you influence cities to charge lower taxes or allow you to build buildings etc.
* geology: Lets you hire people to search for additional resources on the map
* finance: Lets you hire financial people for loans, bonds and the like but I don't know if that's working yet.

All in all it's well worth a look especially if you catch it on discount; even so it's cheaper than some of the rest at normal price. Only slight concern I have, based on their older version 1 game, is they might go over the top on DLCs. I've nothing against expanding with DLCs but the price must not get excessive. Some titles are fond of launching a bare-bones game and making a raft of expensive DLCs. I don't like buying DLC which costs as much or more than the base game. Time will tell on that one.

A good match-3 style game with plenty of variety and reasonably challenging played in timed mode.

From memory playing season match 1 and 2, 3 is definitely more polished and a better game over all.

The match 3s are interspersed with other "pick up the pieces" screens, and the story line links a couple hundred or more levels. There's also an arcade mode if you're bored with the story.

OK so it showed up at a decent discount and I was tempted. Since my initial review things do seem to have improved. There are still issues but overall it's not bad, and there's additional content for tolerable prices too.

Compared with RE1: multiple tracks work better, bridges will now allow more than 2 tracks (a big one). Tracklaying in general works a bit better although it can still infuriate you by refusing to do what you ask and not telling you why. Signalling is a bit hit and miss in manual mode, but automatic seems to cope fairly well. The trains and graphics are nice. Gameplay is pretty similar. The tech tree could do with some more loco choices/research paths, it's a little limited right now and there are only a few locos you end up using all the time. I've a feeling that RE1 had a bit more choice but I may be wrong.
[original review below]
Thought I would try this, as I liked RE1. Unfortunately, although some things have improved, some have gotten worse and to be frank, it's too expensive for what is essentially an update to RE1 with little overall improvement.

I didn't play it long as I didn't want to compromise the ability to refund it. But even in a brief play time, such annoyances as the much less useful signal placement mechanic already irritated me.

If it comes up on a serious discount I may revisit it: as I write it IS on sale: but still €40 which is, to my view, not worth it for the minimal advantages over RE1.

Ages ago there was a cool little game called Pontifex. This is an update of the same idea, using different materials to build bridges with varying difficulty. It's nicely enough done although compared with versions 1 and 2, I don't like that it seems to have lost the visual stress indication when running the simulation. If it's not lost, I can't see how to turn it back on.

On the subject of versions 1 and 2, I got them all 3 in a decently discounted bundle: I suspect I'd be a good deal less keen on version 3 if I'd paid full price for the others. Version 2 seems a bit nicer than version 1 and version 3 works well enough and seems to have some more stuff like weekly challenges. But really, there's not enough difference to justify 3 versions. This is the Dovetail Games marketing model where you buy the same game repeatedly and it doesn't do the devs/publisher much credit in my opinion. If what you've written is an update, then it should be sold as such not a whole new game.

That said it's engaging and fun and I will likely keep it. For me, it's something to get when it's on sale, though. Especially if you already have either of the earlier versions.

A nice industry-maker. Many products to balance and get producing and sneaky things like illness eating all your workers.

Lots of customisation, nice and easy on low settings to get you into it. The game continues to improve since I got it, and with more promised. Too often a promising early-release thing gets abandoned by the developer but so far that hasn't happened here. Still has some issues but for me at least now runs smoothly without errors. Looking forward to new stuff when it arrives.

If you liked such things as Factorio, you'll probably like this. It doesn't have railways but it does have multi-level conveyors, you can have up to 4 layers stacked on top of eachother, for example. If you're keen you can dig trenches and bury pipes underground, too :)

All in all plenty to get your teeth into including, in the later game, managing pollution to keep your workers healthy, and other such tweaks.

One of the best in the Anno collection, although I do also like 2205. The campaign is decently challenging even on normal mode (and if you find it too easy you can turn up the difficulty).

Lots of DLC if you want it, but works without that if you don't. Would definitely recommend Docklands though.

Also has a creative/artistic mode if you just want to build pretty cities and not worry about the whole money and gameplay thing.

Well here's a thing, TSW finally achieves a standard where I can say that I recommend it to other players! And so it should you might think, seeing as they've now sold it to us THREE times.

In TSW3 I've seen a couple of random crashes but to be fair they might've been caused by RAM faults on my system, which is hardly DTG's fault. In general the game works well. There is still work for DTG to do in improving the UI and fixing some very annoying issues in a few places where you get stuck at a never-changing signal, for example. These have been needed since TSW original and we're still waiting: There's also STILL no autosave option, and not even a quicksave key (which I recall there was in the Train Simulator series): to do that you have to program your own with a keyboard macro [ ESC-S-ESC-ESC is the key sequence. I think I may have slight delays in there]

Plus points: The graphics quality continues to be excellent and is now well enough optimised that it runs acceptably even on my outdated PC. My hardware prevents very high framerates, but I no longer see drops to single-digits like I did on TSW original. TSW2 was a bit better but still left much to be desired.

As with the original TSW it can be as immersive as you feel like being: climb down from the cab to uncouple vehicles, turn off all the assistance and HUD, or leave the HUD and aids on and use the free camera to do jobs outside the train without getting your butt off the driver's seat.

As a bonus if you owned TSW2 DLCs on the Steam platform you can re-download them for TSW3 and they still work. Be aware though, if you got it on Epic, tough luck, you have to buy them again.

So there you have it. TSW3 is finally a decent enough train driving simulator, if you're into such things you should like it. I would still, myself, wait for a sale especially for DLCs, the price adds up fast if you pay full rate.

Thought I'd give this a go, as I quite liked Mudrunner. Sadly, it proves impossible to make the controls work effectively. I have a Thrustmaster 300RS wheel, pedals and separate shifter. The game claims to have settings for steering wheel and even has presets for Thrustmaster 300 but it's broken in many ways. Nor will it recognise the shifter.

Throttle pedal makes the truck shoot off backwards. brake pedal makes it go forwards. Clutch pedal does nothing sensible that I could see. Trying to re-assign controls made no sense, nor did it make it work.

Since I managed to get Mudrunner to work reasonably with the same setup I conclude this game is just rubbish. In point of fact the vehicle dynamics and controls never were that good on Mudrunner either, but it was playable. It's a pity, as the mud, and the deformable terrain, was excellent, and from the little I saw is also excellent in this title

Refund time.

I've been playing this since its first launch before it was even on Steam. In all that time it has steadily improved and expanded, the physics has gradually improved to the point where it's getting to be as close as a computer game can be to an actual simulator.

Of course, the main point is driving the truck. If that's not what floats your boat, then you won't like it much. However there is some other stuff to do, once you've explored a bit and made some money, besides buying your own truck and upgrading it you can also buy more garages and hire drivers to drive for you, provide them with trucks an trailers and you can build a Europe-wide transport company, and need not even drive that much yourself. There are a bunch of Steam achievements, too, like "use all the ferries", or "discover the whole map" and that latter one will take you a while even if you don't haul any cargo and just go cruising around everywhere on vacation.

Increasingly, the things you buy in game are officially licensed. No longer do we have "Valiant" and "Majestic" and other imitation brands, the trucks are all official and carry their own names and badges, and now they are expanding a line of "real" trailers to add more to the realism.

Over the years, more and more map DLC has been added. Compared to the early days, these expansions are good. Major intersections, instead of being one or two generic types, are often modelled in detail, and iconic landmarks appear in cities. You can now drive from Porto on the west coast of Portugal all the way to Istanbul in Turkey, and there are still more map DLCs being created and the older areas of the map are being upgraded.

If you prefer the thought of driving in the USA, then you should get American Truck Simulator which is built on the same bespoke SCS game engine, and is equally good IMO

Started game, tried to take the car to test track to end the so-called tutorial, game crashed.

About as useless as the previous time I tried it.

Avoid.