Transport Fever 3 leaves the depot with 90GB of track
Urban Games has released Transport Fever 3 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, almost seven years after Transport Fever 2, with a £44.99 Steam price, a 90GB SSD requirement and a Mixed reception on day one.
Transport Fever 3 is out now. Urban Games released its transport tycoon on 29 September for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, with Paradox Interactive publishing and the Steam edition priced at £44.99 in the UK. The Swiss studio's launch note reads less like a press release than a thank-you card: “Some of the team at Urban Games have dedicated half of their lives to the Transport Fever world,” it says, before promising to keep working through player feedback, ideas and wishes.
The pitch is enormous and pleasantly nerdy. You build freight and passenger networks across land, sea and air, starting in the age of steam and running forward through a century of vehicles, and the towns you connect respond by growing, stalling or quietly rearranging themselves. Delays, detours and missed cargo bite into your reputation and revenue, so the job is as much about maintenance schedules, station bottlenecks, waiting times and cargo priorities as it is about laying a beautiful curve of track through a valley.
It is also, by design, a game about looking at things. The cities run day and night, freight moves in real time, and the studio's own sell is transforming small towns into thriving cities by delivering goods and moving people through an economy that answers every decision you make.
What the editions actually contain
Three editions are on sale. The standard release is the game; the Deluxe Edition adds six legendary vehicles (the Concorde, a London Bus, the Trans-Europe Express, a Peterbilt 359, a Hong Kong Tram and a Sikorsky S-76 Spirit), two landmarks in the Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal, four animals for the maps, and three handcrafted scenarios. A Collector's Edition bundles the same digital content with physical goods for anyone who wants shelf furniture alongside their signalling diagrams.
The rig you will need
The system requirements are the part that will catch people out. On PC you need Windows 10 or 11 in 64-bit, 8GB of RAM, a processor with AVX2 support at the level of an Intel Core i5-8400 or an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, and a graphics card with 4GB of VRAM — an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060, an AMD Radeon RX 480 or an Intel Arc A380. The storage line is the one to read twice: 90GB, on an SSD, with the SSD listed as a requirement rather than a suggestion. The Steam build also runs on macOS and Linux, 13 languages are supported, controller support is in, and the package includes a level editor.
A mixed first day on Steam
Day one has been busy but divisive. At the time of writing the game sits on 53 per cent positive from 173 user reviews, which lands in Steam's Mixed band, while Transport Fever 3 also appears in SteamDB's list of global top sellers for the week of 22 to 29 September. Urban Games has form with slow burns: Transport Fever 2 arrived in December 2019, was profitable within weeks and sold millions, and was still being extended with a full console version in March 2023 — a reminder that this series tends to be judged over years rather than hours.
Our opinion
The hardware bar is the real story of this launch, not the price. A 90GB SSD requirement and an AVX2-capable processor quietly draw a line through the machines that happily ran Transport Fever 2, and that line matters more in 2026 than the £44.99 does. Transport sims have always asked for patience; asking for 90GB of solid state storage is a different kind of commitment, especially for anyone playing on a laptop, and it tells you the studio has bet on simulation depth and scenery rather than a lean rebuild on old hardware.
The Mixed reception deserves context rather than a shrug. Transport Fever 2 launched in December 2019 and was still being given a full console version in March 2023, which is the shape of a game treated as a platform rather than a product. If the third instalment follows that curve, a day-one review percentage is a snapshot of an unfinished conversation rather than a verdict, and the launch note's promise to keep working through player wishes is the thing worth holding the studio to. The interesting question is not whether the launch build is finished, but whether this team's post-launch work rate matches the one it showed last time.