Train Fever
Skip · Strategy · 2014
The verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $19.99.
- Length
- 15h
- Value
- $1.33/hr
- Reviews
- 64% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, Nvidia GeForce 8800 512 MB, ATI Radeon HD 3850 512 MB. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
It’s the year 1850, and there are great times ahead! Establish a transport company and be its manager. Build infrastructure such as railways and stations, purchase transportation vehicles and manage lines. Fulfill the people’s needs and watch cities evolve dynamically.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $1.99. That was March 2022. It has been discounted 86 times in the 12 years tracked here, typically at 85 percent off, with about 7 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
It is pricier than 92 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 87 percent. The games it most resembles do better on the same math. Transport Fever 2 ($39.99, scores 79) and Transport Fever ($29.99, scores 61) both outscore it.
This site sampled 279 of its Steam-purchase reviews; none were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 23 percent of the 467 reviews written there were positive, against 64 percent overall, and those are 17 percent of everything written about it.
15 hours to finish it, 103 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 6.8 times the campaign.
The drop-off
79% start to 1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
9 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Immediately after buying this game I realize how good game it was but after 20 hours I realized is more complex than it seems and it requires some certain time to understand how it actually functions. I have spent around 160 hours trying to get all achievements and man, I had enough. I can tell that Transport Fever (the game after this) is 10 times better and has better mechanics than this particular game. I don't...
BLUF: if you're tempted to pick this up on sale for $1.99, just get Transport Fever for $4.49 instead. This has been sitting in my library unplayed for years, though I played and enjoyed the first Transport Fever. I picked it up for a while just to say I completed one game, and it's (maybe predictably) an inferior version of its sequel in just about every way. More of the challenge comes from how obtuse it is than...
A charming and ambitious transport simulation that focuses strongly on building and managing railway networks. It has a slower and more classic feel, but that is part of its appeal. Planning tracks, choosing vehicles, and helping towns develop through better connections makes the experience rewarding. Even if it feels simpler than newer games in the genre, it still offers a lot of enjoyment for fans of transport and...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Train Fever scores 15/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/304730/train-feverThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 20, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.