BUS! As good a name as any for a company. It has been a few years since I last played a Bus Simulator title, if you discount the title from the developer of the previous release in the series. Now, with the development team behind the mildly reviewed Taxi Life: A City Driving Simulator, Bus Simulator 27 takes you back to creating a mass public transport system. This time, exclusively in Europe, Felicia Bay is a Hispanic-infused, Mediterranean town that was rocked by corruption within its public transport system. Now you have to service the city with your “expert” driving and “brilliant” people skills.

I believe you can hear the sarcasm dripping from that last sentence, as you timidly take a couple of tight corners, run late, scream at imaginary traffic, and when someone starts playing their crap music at full volume on their phone, you want to beat them to death with your shoe. Good news though, the town of Felicia Bay has gone cashless. No more OAPs paying a small fare with a $20 banknote. You are just rushed into giving someone a ticket the millisecond they step on the bus.

With the help of your assistant, the liaison from the city, Marta Navarro Blanco, you get an autistic-coded guide to building a bus company, again. Yes, it is a tutorial, but all the same, she’s written to think public transport is the creation of a higher power. Nope, just capitalism – I’m running a private bus company after all. With her mild help and the prior knowledge, you set up the routes, help drive them, and occasionally do a mission that simply requires you (shocked Pikachu meme) to drive the bus routes to unlock different buses and upgrade bus stops.

On paper, Bus Simulator 27 seems to be a bit more focused, a bit more centralized around the point of work, and a lot more about managing the routes with occasional driving than doing continual loops. In the premise, I get it, but in action there is something left to be desired. There is a roughness we’ve seen throughout the last couple of weeks we’ve had to play for review, and some of it I can shrug off; others I don’t think the kindest of players who pay full price would be excited about.

As previously mentioned, story-wise you have Marta introducing you to the mayor, transport secretary, and so on, with the missions moving on to these individuals offering their own drip-fed bits of gameplay. Including corrupt cronyism that I am sure ruined the last company. Once again I’m left saying, it isn’t bad. It is just one of those bits you sort of accept. Don’t come into Bus Simulator 27 expecting an Oscar for best written screenplay or best actor, because you’ll not be getting those sorts of performances. It is boilerplate stuff across the board.

With each mission, you are tasked with driving the bus route you’ve just set up once or occasionally doing other things, such as catching fare dodgers. This isn’t my problem. Gameplay is as you’d expect for such a game, though maybe a little less engaging or “tactile.” For want of a better word. Without money to care about, tickets are those godforsaken E-tickets (I’ve had real issues recently with them) that everything wants you to have, and so that side of it somewhat feels like punching numbers. Something that’s just as fiddly and cumbersome when driving with a steering wheel while still doing less.

I probably wouldn’t care as much if the schedule you have to stick to for the timetable wasn’t as strict. If you are running on time, any small hint of gameplay other than closing doors and driving off becomes very annoying. Yes, I know that’s a real problem with service bus companies as is, and it isn’t a problem that’s ever addressed. The point I am more so making is that for a game that should be user-friendly, it is a pain to get some of the most basic parts of gameplay done. Let’s use a rather lengthy example:

You are running a couple of (in-game) minutes late, maybe 10 at a push because traffic in the city center was heavy and the traffic lights weren’t kind to you. You come to the next stop, and you see there is a wheelchair user, so you have to kneel the bus, lower the ramp, and open the doors, so that’s another in-game minute away when you’re already running late. Then you’re dealing out tickets as people are getting on, so that’s another minute or two.

Now you need to pick the ramp back up, and lift the bus back up, but someone up the back of the bus is now playing music as loud as can be out of their iPhone YYZ. Turns out, you can’t shout “I’ll strip you, bury you head first, and use you as my bike stand.” So after slowly walking all the way up there, and walking all the way back, you now need to close the doors, release the handbrake, and indicate out of the bus stop.

However, you need to remember that if you’re on a corner where a bus stop is within 100 yards, you need to indicate right to go round the corner but left to come out of the bus stop. To put it politely, you are up the Ganges without a paddle. If you don’t indicate to come left out of the bus stop, you are dinged for not being safe, but equally, not indicating right to go around that corner is unsafe. It is enough to make you scream at three in the morning.

Add to this that you are also the person breaking up these creepy people who bother others on a bus, to whom I nearly broke a man’s arm and told him I’d make him do shadow puppets at the back of his throat if he didn’t stop. No, that’s a real story, not just one for the game. Passengers don’t really have agency other than to ask why you haven’t issued them a ticket the millisecond they step on the bus.

They can’t say amongst themselves to stop with the music, stop harassing other passengers, wake up, and the one I’ve experienced while sat in the pilot seat on a Tourismo: People wanting off before the designated stop. Again, I get that’s part of the job. However, the frequency on default settings is no less annoying despite that fact, and yes, you can alter it. In fact, there is quite a bit of customization in the world settings, including turning off the penalties for running a red light or not indicating.

However, there is one option within the world settings that I think kind of feels one step away from doing something else questionable. I believe I have said it before, but with the previous Bus Simulator title, dealing with wheelchair users for the normal inner-city buses, like the Citaro, it can get tiring to press all the buttons, be told off for being late, and then have to do it all over again. In-game, it is not a very fun system. In real life, it is a fact of life, and if you’re being paid to do it, suck it up, buttercup.

In Bus Simulator 27, though, you can, as I’ve just said, change the frequency of several things, including turning off wheelchair users. Part of me doesn’t mind the idea of lowering the frequency for which you have wheelchair user passengers, but the ability to plainly turn them off feels like a cop out when you have the option as a player to drive the Irizar i8 and Mercedes-Benz Tourismo. Two coaches that are not exactly accessible to wheelchair users. Maybe I’m weird, but turning off disabled passengers outright feels like a step away from turning off other characters you don’t like.

Yet, as a game, these are hardly the biggest issues. We’ve had a while to play Bus Simulator 27 now, and that time has been wrought with bugs, glitches, annoyances, and more that simply make Bus Simulator 27 difficult to enjoy the same way you probably have the previous game in the series. I won’t go into too many details on bugs we saw before general (advance access) release, but even after that we’ve seen people gliding along like Charles Xavier when they have no chair. This is just one of the more “shrug it off” issues.

I will, however, be very surprised to find that anyone enjoys the traffic AI, which is, to put it lightly, worse than driving a coach down Princess Street with all the non-descript food delivery bikes. There is one example where I’d be driving along a T-junction, and I was on the major road (the top of the T) when a car decided to pull out and stop in the middle of the junction because the AI recognized: Big bus + high speed = big smash. Thankfully, I also had the wherewithal to hit the brakes as the car pulled out. Crash avoided, right?

So, even though logic suggests I would have the right of way, and I slowly proceeded as such after coming to a full stop because of the impending collision, that doesn’t stop the AI. Oh, how very intelligent. Worse still, the car proceeded into the side of the bus at a slow speed, and who gets the fine? Why yes, of course it is the bus with the right of way, logic, and every known traffic law on its side, but you still get docked points, heavy fines for “causing a collision,” and in-game reviews of your driving tell you how you should drown in a river.

This didn’t happen once, nor twice, but five times on different roads. If that isn’t an issue, cars stopping instantly because they have broken down doesn’t help, and if you dare to indicate to make a turn, only on occasion will you be given positive points for driving well. Mostly because if you don’t instantly cut off the indicator the nanosecond you’ve gotten straight, you’ll be told you’re using your indicators while driving straight.

Here is the thing: I wanted to like Simteract and Astragon Entertainment’s Bus Simulator 27. I was excited for it after the “meh” release of Stillalive Studios’ Bus Bound, yet despite its nice look and generally appealing overall presentation, Bus Simulator 27 is very unpolished at the time of its release. I like the city, I like the variety of bus options, and I somewhat like the gameplay. Marred slightly by a glitch where hitting buttons for any reason meant the accelerator would disengage with my wheel and pedals, making gameplay more annoying than it should be. Yet, on paper, I am screaming at it to let me enjoy it.

Ultimately, Bus Simulator 27 is like the rail replacement service for what you already own; it doesn’t feel as nice as the train, it won’t be as quick, and it won’t be as nice right now, but I guess it would be better than sleeping on the rail platform. I am hoping that eventually the issues are fixed, that the gameplay is more enjoyable, and that we all get a refreshed Bus Sim after several years, but I don’t think that will be at launch.

A PC review copy of Bus Simulator 27 was provided by Astragon Entertainment for this review.

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Bus Simulator 27

$49.99

6

Score

6.0/10

Pros

• A great selection of buses.
• A nice city to drive around.

Cons

• Terrible AI traffic.
• Lots of bugs and glitches.
• Generally feels unpolished.