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Can't believe I've played this game for 194 hours over a period of several years now and never reviewed it. This game deserves all the praise it can get. It is one of the best transport-themed games ever - yes, probably surpassing both Railroad Tycoon 2 and Transport Tycoon, even for their time.
This is a sprawling, *nearly* complete transport simulation that follows a similar formula to others in the genre - build transport to link industries and passenger centers and create economic growth. There's nothing all that innovative here, but what's different is just that everything is well thought out and refined. It's a very easy game to get into and play, with an intuitive interface, but has a lot of depth and challenge behind it when you really sink your teeth in. I played the original game in the series as well and I loved it too, but honestly I don't even remember what was different. TF2 has just completely taken over in my mind as the definitive game in the series, like Railroad Tycoon 2 vs. RT1.
It also has a lot of elements that are just *fun* - some games in this genre tend to be a little dry, but the designers of this game obviously are really into transportation themselves and they've made it fun to just watch trains, buses, planes, even cars (which are driven by individuals for a purpose, and you can just click to find out what that purpose is; they're not random). I do have a few mods intended to make things more realistic, but even just something like the realistic braking mod for trains makes things look really, really good. I can just sit there watching things for hours once I've built things up a bit. It almost makes it hard to keep progressing in the game! It's like having a giant model train set.
You can also ride along in your vehicles and see things from either an operator or passenger perspective. That can be fun too, because even up close, the graphics still hold up and things can look very different on the ground than they do from your normal aerial perspective. Again, it ends up having a look like a model train, if you've ever watched those videos on YouTube where someone straps a camera to a train.
One thing the game does a little differently from some others is that it's all about the supply chain and reaching the end customer. In some transport games you can just randomly link individual industries or towns and you'll make money because those industries will then find ways to sell whatever product they're making with the materials you deliver. But that's not really the case in TF2. For example, a steel mill will buy coal and iron ore from you if it's not linked to anywhere that buys steel, but not really much of it, and it'll drop off even further once they've got a bunch in storage. The iron and coal mines, in turn, won't produce much for you because the steel mill doesn't really need it. But if you connect that steel mill to a machines factory, and then also provide the machines factory with lumber (which requires logs to start with - another supply chain), and *then* link that machines factory to a city with industries that needs machines, all of the mines and factories in the chain will start producing as much as they need to in order to fill that demand, as long as you're able to carry it.
So you really need to look at demand for end products when you start thinking about laying out your routes and lines, and then you need to look at whether it's possible to put together a full supply line with the budget you have. Sometimes there may be one ingredient missing on your side of the map, so you either need to build a really long train line (which is expensive) and buy several trains (also expensive) to reach that resource wherever it is, or maybe you need to build airports and buy airplanes (also very expensive), assuming you're in a time period when that's available. You may even need to be willing to accept a loss on one or two lines to generate profit for the entire supply chain. It is often not profitable to fly coal around by airplane (nor very environmentally friendly, which is a consideration in the game!), for example, but sometimes you may have to do things like that for the good of the overall business.
Of course there are passenger lines too, and these are a little simpler to deal with - just link up population centers and you're golden. You can make bus, train, air and even ship passenger lines. The number of passengers you can actually carry will depend on the population and demand - the game actually models individual people (like sims!) and whether they want to go somewhere else for work, shopping or whatever. You can also do both long-distance and intra-city transit. You can even watch the traffic to see where people want to go, and make lines accordingly. Cities will grow realistically (well, with a mod) if they're getting the products and people they need. (Without a mod, they just grow over time with connections.)
All of this is assuming a free game, which is what you'll play after completing the campaigns. The campaigns are pretty fun and challenging but last about 30 hours. That's still a pretty good value even if you just play them and nothing else. I've obviously put in about 160 hours after that, though, in the free game with automatically-generated maps. In the campaigns, the maps are curated and have specific problems and goals for you to solve. If you've played any of the Railroad Tycoon games, you know the drill. I do feel like there's a little bit of an odd political subtext to some of the scenarios, but it's hard to tell if it's the designers just writing from the perspective of how they think a transport company would feel about things, or if they actually feel that way themselves. Anyway, it doesn't really affect anything, but it did make me chuckle occasionally at just how overt some of the politics are.
There are campaigns for three separate world areas and they include different vehicles for each. So you can play with Asian, American or European vehicles. The designers are European but they seem to have put equal care into all the vehicles. They also seem to have tried to make all three equivalent. There are some standout vehicles from each region, ones that no vehicle from the others can match, but that mirrors real life. Overall, you'll always find vehicles that can get the job done, and in terms of the train cars themselves, each region has cars with the exact same specs, they just look different. So you'll always have the same cargo hauling capability, at least by train. (For trucks, the American side does end up with the highest capacity truck, but it's the last one you get, so it doesn't affect the game until late in the 20th century.)
In the free game, you can play with any of the three sets (as well as town names to match), or you can have them all. You can also download tons of new vehicles through the Workshop. Keep in mind that a lot of these will seriously unbalance the game, but they're cool to see anyway. For example, the biggest airplane you can ever get by default is the 757 and its equivalent Tu-204. They carry 50 and 52 cargo, respectively. But you can download a 747-8 that carries 200 cargo. Obviously that's quite a game-changer. There are also freight locomotives you can download that just take away the act of having to select the right engine for the job, since they're pretty much perfect for any freight service (like the EMD SD70AC... though if you can afford it, the ACS-64 makes a surprisingly good high-speed freight loco too). Again, they're fun to see running in the game and it's pretty realistic in the modern day to just see one type of loco pretty much everywhere, but you might want to keep them out of the game for a while just for gameplay purposes.
This game is really a must if you're a fan of transport-themed simulations.