Traffic Giant

"Play traffic cop in SimCity"

When I heard Traffic Giant was in production, I knew it was going to be something I wanted. I'm a huge sim fan, as everyone who knows me will tell you. Once some screenshots were released, there was one game that came to mind: Sim City. In Sim City, you have to build a city, basically from ground up, and keep everyone happy. It's more complicated than that, but many of you have played Sim City.

The graphics in Traffic Giant seem to be based right from Maxis' Sim City series, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The graphics won't necessarily "wow" anyone, but they're fairly solid, and they will work with the majority of PCs, since they don't require a high-end graphics card.

Now onto game play. If you're looking for exciting action, go buy Tribes or Quake. Any real sim gamer will appreciate this game. Depending on which level and setting you choose for game play, you are dumped into a growing city and you must find a way to get people from point A to point B. People use cars right now, but cars cause traffic jams and it's just way too much traffic. So, you must provide buses, Trams, and Railroads for transportation. Buses are the most common form of transportation that you will use, since it's much, much cheaper to run and to purchase. Buses also don't require tracks, which will save you money that way as well.

As with all of the various forms of transportation, there are various levels of them. You'll find several types of buses, for example. They vary in a number of ways, including price, operating cost, passenger capacity, speed, and how attractive it is. If the transportation is more attractive, it will get more people to ride it. Buses can't carry nearly as many people as say Trams and Railroads can. Depending on the bus model, the maximum capacity is 80 people, and that's the LT Elephant model, which is a double-decker. The MD Zebra, which is a Monorail, can carry up to 250 passengers at once, which is three times that of the largest bus. You must remember that the monorail isn't available in the beginning of the games.

One of the selling points of Traffic Giant is its game play. There are numerous scenarios available, and from what I hear, JoWooD Productions, will also make more available for download on their website. Traffic Giant will give you many, many hours of game play. The various modes of game play also give you some extra replayability. Not only are you able to play a scenario against the PC, which has someone in there doing the same job you are, but there is a mode (Entrepreneur), where you are all on your own, going for the maximum amount of everything. You can basically do anything at your own pace, which is kind of nice.

There was another mode of game play that surprised me, and that was multiplayer. I had no idea they would have put that feature in the game. At the time of reviewing this game, the game had not hit the store shelves, so I was unable to test this mode.

All in all, this game's pretty good. The majority of the sim fans will enjoy this game. You can think of this game as taking what you did in a Sim City saved game, and basically controlling the traffic with this game. If Sim City had this sort of control added to it, it would have huge replayability. This game is definitely worth the $20-30 it is shipping at.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/31/05