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"You are in charge, sir!"

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 19 / 20
Date: April 20, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Some critics say Traffic Giant is a sheer boredom. But if you spend your patience with it, your are immensely rewarded. Backed by a solid economic model, the game emphasis on planning and long-term strategy. You are CEO of a public transport company. Your only goal: makes it profitable.

You start from scratch to build a transportation company by drawing your bus routes inside the cities, purchasing buses, coaches, double-decks from a wide range of selection, setting up bus stops along the busiest streets, and adjusting your bus fares, planning your advertising campaigns, setting your employees' wages and off you go, hoping the "sims" in the city would choose your company's services...rather than their own cars.

Pre-planning is required. The economic model is surprisingly believable, taking into account of all the important factors at a right proportion. Are your fares set reasonably? Are the bus stations located convenient enough? Do the buses provide reliable services? Are the buses going to the place that the "sims" really want? The prices are too expensive? What are the competitors doing? You've got to answer all these questions. You can always get the feedback from the citizens in the streets or their own cars. And the no. of passengers waiting at the bus stations would tell you if you are going along the right track.

Apart from making your own company profitable, your commitments to reduce the level of traffic congestion, providing a satisfying level of services measured in terms of popularity of each of your bus routes, company's image, and even the attractiveness of your buses and stations, are all but important. Setting too high a level of bus fares and wrecking one of your buses in the middle of the road would certainly prove detrimental. And don't forget, your other competitors won't give you a second chance.

If your company is profitable enough, you can always grow even "bigger" by laying tracks. Yes, trams and trains are available and they are expensive to purchase and maintain. Do it only if your company's cash position is strong enough. Remember, you can't do anything if you have negative cash balance...except selling off your own assets. But the trams and trains carry more people than a mere 100-passengers double- deck... and they seldom break.

In the campaign game, you are monopolizing the public transport (i.e. no competitor) but are given the priorities by the local municipal. If you are doing well, the authority would release one to three more cities for you to run your business, with a different set of goals. But your company is not carrying over to the next city. You always start from scratch. The campaign scenarios are overall well structured and you are given increasing difficult objectives. At one point, you are responsible to save a company from the verge of going bankrupt. However, you are never stuck by a single campaign scenario because you can always "skip" the difficult one and proceed to the next available, if you so wish. This thoughtful "flexibility" in the campaign design is greatly applauded.

While the campaign game is mildly challenged, you can always pit your wits against one to three computer competitors in a cutthroat price war or in a race to be the first one to find the best routes at the best price. The AI is generally competent. They extend their route to your area of operations relentlessly if they find it profitable. This game truly gives you the survivalist view in a commercial jungle.

The game's graphics are exquisite: churches, swimming pools, shopping arcades, cinemas, parks, governmental buildings, factories, commerce center...all are there. You can zoom in and out of the city at three levels. You always feel the vivid life in a city with the bustling voices of people, engines, tram bells etc.

Having all that, Traffic Giant is not without drawbacks though. You cannot design express route (i.e. fewer stops) overlapping the existing routes because you must have the same stops of an existing route along the same streets. Multiplayer is apparently not working for the moment. Interface design is rigid and takes you a while to get used to, with very few short-cut keys. In a non-competitive environment, you find not many things to do if your company is well established for constant cash-inflow, other than watching the highs and lows of the economic cycle in the game. Several game bugs also boot you back to the desktop all of a sudden. So "saves" your company (a.k.a. game) often. But these are just some quibbles for an otherwise splendid game.

Overall, Traffic Giant is the game that glues you to the monitor. In a risk-free environment, you run you company at million dollars and get a taste of what it's like a CEO, solve the all too headache traffic congestion problem, Traffic Giant offers you value for every dollar of your money.

Best game in a long time.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: May 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This game is the best thing to happen to the U.S. in a long time. It'l teach people that there are other fun ways of getting around besides the automobile. America's love affair with the automobile has been the worst thing for the environment, and has created gridlock unimaginable 30 years ago. Traffic Giant will give us a new way of thinking.(a better and smarter one) Thank you JoWood.

Bought European release

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: May 20, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I own a copy of the full game (I bought the European version through a company in Memphis) The gameplay is very original. I especially enjoy being able to choose different difficulty settings and maps to play. My only complaint is that occasionally the game would crash (recently reformatted drive and re-installed. Haven't gotten around to playing again yet, so I don't know if the problem went away) and lock up my system. The patch and a fresh install of the video driver did help some, but the problem persisted. I'm hoping that the game will run better on the newly formatted drive with correct video drivers.

Great concept, but it's full of bugs!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 12
Date: June 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

After successfully installing this game and downloading the latest patch from the website.. version 1.3. I got the game up and running. Unfortunately only half of the game works. There are two distict play modes: Campaign and Endless. Only the Campaign works, the Endless portion does not successfully load and leaves your system hanging without a possibility of shutting the application down. You have to unplug your system and do a harsh reboot with all of your fancy utilities checking the system for errors. It's a real pain.

I've emailed the company which is located in Austria. Of course their technical support only works three hours a day Monday through Thursday. Nevertheless, my email has remained unanswered.

Another unfortunate problem is that you get a small bus to start out with and all of the other transportation options that appeared to be available when I bought this aren't there. Some games give you a limited supply of technology and take you through some time while improvements and new options become available. This game must have some kind of bug in it because I've played the Campaign version for hours and can't get any other options. I have a small 10 person capacity bus with hundred of people waiting at bustops that can't get on the stupid thing.

Great graphics and sound though, and if it were'nt for the play difficulites and other bugs I would consider this game to be a fantastic innovation is business strategy games. Intead.. A BIG THUMBS DOWN! Don't waste your money, the company is foreign and you won't get your money back because it's software.

Extremely Addictive!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: June 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

One of those pc games you can't walk away from. I guarantee you'll get hooked once you start playing. I was doing some temp work in the Washington, DC metro area and fired up the game on my laptop (while I was waiting for my bus). One metrobus driver asked me what I was playing and I got a kick out of telling him I was planning bus routes! He shrugged his head and laughed...but I thought it was amusing.

Traffic Giant The Best Simulation Game for Busses and Trains

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 8
Date: July 03, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I have both version the 1.0 which I bought from cdaccess.com and I just bought the us version 1.3 and have not experience any problems with the game at all on both version, all works with all the updates and patchs for 1.0 all the campaign works and it is great, I susgest if you haveing problems with your video card get one that has like 64 mb's of memory on it so it won't take up to many resorces of your machine, that can solve most of the freeze ups and get window XP when it comes out cuase windows 98, Me any of them on to long will with anygame you play to long will give you errors most of the time you just reboot machine and you can continue to play, you don't have to take my word for it all I know I have no problem with the game whats so ever. Go buy it, you won't be disappointed.

This game's great!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: July 25, 2001
Author: Amazon User

i downloaded a demo for this game and i must say that it is great. It is extremely engrossing and i cant stop playing this game. it has almost no cons, but the only thing i find annoying is the bus accidents. Even though there are a lot of limitations in the demo, its still fun to play. the graphics are great, but the soundtrack could do with some improvement, as i have noticed with the demo. But if anyone is thinking about buying this game, then i would surely recommend it, and its definitely woth it!

System Crashes

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: September 21, 2001
Author: Amazon User

There are serious bugs once you get to advanced stages. I have had repeated screen freezes and system crashes. Twice my system has been so seriously corrupted that I have had to re-format my hard drive and re-load everything. The only common denominator in those cases was this game. After the last re-format, I will no longer load or play Traffic Giant. That's too bad because this game had a lot of potential.

Great Game with lots of Problems... Don't buy it!!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: September 26, 2001
Author: Amazon User

After playing this game several times, I found it to be a lot of fun, but then it started having problems. It randomly freezes or crashes with no explanation. If you check the JoWood website you can see in their support forum that this is a problem that many are having and that is being ignored. This really shows a problem on their part.

Great Game with crash problem

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: October 21, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Trust the other guy's review and mine: This game crash without reasons. This is an addictive and fun game, but it is so annoying that it keeps crashing my computer. Buy it at your own risk.

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