Upon installing Transport Giant I had a strange sense of Déjà vu. You see for a game released in 2004 I swear I have played it before. Not just played it mind - but played it to death. I swear I’ve already spent a month solid doing the same things, and in a funny way I have - almost ten years ago with a game called Transport Tycoon. I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not, and after looking on the official website for the game it seems as if it must be pure coincidence, but this new game plays and looks very similar to the 1996 game - that however, is no bad thing. As I said above I played Tycoon for weeks on end – it took up many a holiday from college and I have fond memories of me and my best mate having competitions as to who could achieve the most on the game - in fact, he was still playing the game until very recently…

Transport Giant is a strategy game in which the goal is to make money and become the number one transport company in the game. You do this by constructing road, rail, sea and air links which allow you to transport goods and passengers around the gaming world whilst trying to fight off your competitors and overcome disasters and breakdowns.

The game does have a mission mode which sets you goals and objectives to achieve, but for me the real pull of the game is the never ending mode. The game starts in 1850 and you start your business with just the technology that would have been available to you then. In the 1800s you will be limited to just horse-drawn carriages and wagon trains, but as time and technology moves on you will get your hands on a huge variety of vehicles to make your business a winner. Better roads and mass production will see the motor vehicle being introduced, which allows you to use trucks, whilst the rail network starts with basic steam trains. As the years tick over your mass transport needs can see you using huge jumbo jets in which to carry your precious cargo.

It’s a delicate balancing act that is required to turn over a profit. Some mines produce more ore than others but some steelworks will not be able to handle the extra raw materials. Also time and distance need to be considered. The faster you get the goods over greater distances the more money you can make. At the start of the game you find yourselves just having small shuttle runs back and forth, but once you get trains and the like you find yourself having a HUGE number of options of how to move the goods around. What was a single platform station can soon turn into a busy junction, and with this in mind you have to design complicated track systems thus preventing train crashes and allowing more trains to share a single stretch of track.

The game does look lovely – whilst it may look a little simple in the screenshots the graphics are highly detailed. There is always something happening and it’s easy to tell exactly what everything is just by looking at it thanks to intricate modelling on each and every vehicle and building. However, that said, zoomed out it looks very similar to that older game (albeit with higher resolution and the benefits of 2004 graphic cards).

This is clearly not going to be a game for everyone. It’s not instantly rewarding and it’s not the easiest game to get into, but for anyone who had the same pleasant flashbacks as me when reading paragraph two, it’s going to be an essential purchase.