What was it that James May said about driving a bus? “Easiest thing I’ve ever done […] it’s easier actually [than sitting on a sofa], ’cause you are not being filmed. So you can have a joint.” He was right, there isn’t an easier job or thing around once you get a hang of it. Sure, my driving instructor was Reg Varney, but I am a solid driver. I went into the training/test area of Bus Simulator 21 to try out the buses you get early on and was praised for being able to drive between the cones properly. It turns out my brain knew straight away that the wheels were behind me, so I should turn a bit later than I might expect.

Joking aside, it was an actual bus driver that said that, which may give the hint that I started out with a bit of an advantage already. That and I had the experience of traveling the length and breadth of the country on buses for long enough. By 12, I knew you shouldn’t poo in those chemical toilets no matter what. You learn those lessons the hard way. Just as you do having to deal with the general public. As I said, driving the bus is the easiest thing you can do, but the dealing with the public is a whole other story. This isn’t really aided by the menu systems or slightly unintuitive controls. Default settings are ridiculously sensitive (so play about with those), passengers have a propensity to babble nonsensically right in your ear, and then there are the wheelchairs.

As a game, Bus Simulator 21 functions as you’d expect while being the latest edition in a rather short-lived series so far. You drive buses around generic-looking towns with your empire built on a mountain of Werther’s Originals and swearing profusely at any and all insignificant annoyances. I say it functions as you’d expect because (at times) performance is variable with intermittent stutters. That is not enough to make the entire experience a slog, but it happens often enough to fling your head back talking to whatever higher power you believe in and whisper, “please don’t hit X.” Not that penalties really matter, as you can rack up several violations of red lights being run or other offenses. You’ll still be doing a Scrooge McDuck impression by the end of the day. 

Each payday brings in enough money that would make you blindly believe it would be impossible for public services, like buses, should ever be out of pocket. This is understandable, I am the one that keeps saying games don’t have to be realistic if they can bring a sense of fun. However, eight services with one bus each, 20-hours a day, in and out in terms of maintenance, and several other expenditures (including insurance) probably shouldn’t be making 90K a day. Advertisements or not, that’s a lot of money when you are handed €20 for a €1.20 fare and have to hand back €18.80 in change. I did that once all in €0.05 coins; I’ll take your money which is screwing me over, but two can play this game. Also yes, it is all in euros with no currency converter.

I must say, within the first hour I was shouting at wheelchair users because playing a PC-centric game on a controller mapped by a gibbon was hard enough. Then when asked to lower the ramp I nearly dropped kicked someone, as I repeatedly received a message informing me there was something blocking the ramp at multiple stops. It turns out when the game tells you to kneel the bus at every stop, it is wrong. The best course of action is to not bother so the ramp isn’t blocked by the curb itself 90% of the time. Wheelchair users at curbed stops, people who hand over way too much money, and those who forget they are alive halfway in the door, can all sit in the same circle of hell. Don’t worry, it is wheelchair accessible!

Part of me was getting angry, and that may have been for multiple reasons including one or two outside the game. The lines passenger parrots are echoing in my head as we speak: If I have to hear “I’m on the bus!” or “Nothing like casinos” once more, I may just snap and fling the bus in the water. There are many things that are purposefully annoying, and I understand that. As I was told several times by who I referenced as Reg Varney a minute ago, some of those annoying lines or the €20 for a €3.00 fare are real problems for drivers. Then there are things that aren’t purposefully infuriating, but they plainly are.

Of course, since the system uses a controller with much fewer buttons than a keyboard, it does become a little irritating to open the wheeled menu of all bus controls. I’m talking about having to lower the ramp, activate wipers and lights, along with other details that are useful to have mapped but just can’t be. It is all the more frustrating to have some of those close the menu automatically when you want to do several all at once or mistakenly click on something you weren’t planning on. Thanks to that design choice, I turned on the wipers just in time to make a woman red-mist in a head-on collision. Another decision I don’t understand is the bell on CNG and petroleum-fueled buses that simply sounds like an alarm or violation sound effect, not a bell. 

Yet, through all of these constant frustrations with bubbling up anger as I shout swear words at people handing me far too much money, I really enjoy Bus Simulator 21. I should enjoy it! I’ve played for over 20-hours in a very short amount of time. After stepping away from it to watch F1 over the weekend, I’d return straight back to driving buses. Despite shouting at every passenger, despite the controls being annoying, and despite missions being about as well explained as children making “YEET” a word, along with so much more, I kept coming back. Bus Simulator 21 hits all those perfect spots in my head that will play Euro Truck Simulator 2 (and it’s ilk) or F1 2020 for hours because it is simple and the reward in my head is constant.

That said, on the Xbox One, it is not a pretty or smooth-running game all the time. In fact, I’d call it quite an ugly game with a frame rate so variable that it is like the replacement bus service for the trains that are on strike. Image sharpening options made everything look like there was some sort of severe screen tearing. Motion blur can stay where it belongs in the bin, and generally there is a lot of pop-in while driving about the map. All of which is enough for some that they’d prefer not to play Bus Simulator 21 on console at all, and I only slightly understand that. This is putting aside my history of saying graphics don’t matter: They didn’t in the PS2-era, so they shouldn’t now.

However, there is more that would put off those same people: there are lots and lots of bugs. From steering wheels turning the wrong way in the Setra buses that are low enough to be wheelchair accessible to the ticket machine sometimes freaking out and not allowing me to select anything, and bums! Ok, the last one needs explaining. As you take over a bus, such as the MANs or Enviro200, you’ll be taking over from one of your employees who may just get up and impale themselves in the steering wheel. This probably creates the world’s weirdest sexual harassment lawsuits this side of Activision-Blizzard’s worries of late. In first-person, there is just a man or a woman’s bum in your face for a couple of stops until they get off.

There are more minor issues, such as clipping through objects and the like. Some object hitboxes cause crashes despite the object being a little bit away, cars and people jerk about, and people lunge out into the street to get ahead of a 20mph bus two feet away. This all comes alongside AI that may forget driving includes moving on a road, causing traffic jams. One or two of those traffic jams may be intentional (ask the developer about that one) to bring those issues to the game. However, in some areas it is far too common to be a feature.

All this said, one thing that is rather inexcusable is being unable to remap the controller. Yes, I get that some things like acceleration and braking are rather important, I’d want to keep them too. Nonetheless, maybe there should have been an option to lock the game to first-person (or third-person), and then I wouldn’t need the left stick to hop in and out of views. While we’re on the subject, the reason I made that woman red-mist by accidentally turning on the windscreen wipers is that the left stick (used to steer the bus) is also used for your radial bus menu. So, if you are driving along at a decent pace and open the wheel to turn on wipers, you’ll end up turning hard to the right.

Why this menu isn’t controlled by the right analog stick (used to look around) instead of the left which is used to drive the bus is beyond me. You are more likely to be driving when it starts to rain, which it does more in a single day than it does in Scotland in a year. It only makes sense to map the right stick for that. Just as it would be more helpful to remap the speed limit button to be something useful like the wheelchair ramp, so I don’t have to open the menu every time someone in a wheelchair needs to get on or off the bus. The door and kneeling are mapped, so why not that also?

I think it may also be worth noting that there are repeated crashes. Mostly it would take too long starting up, then I’d have the Xbox tell me something went wrong. That’s easy enough to fix, just attempt to boot the game again. However, a couple of times, I was in the menu to buy new buses at the dealership and the game would freeze. The only solution was to close it and reload it. Most recently, I’d been playing for a few hours and the Xbox abruptly informed me that it could no longer allocate video memory to what was running, Bus Simulator 21. So, that was a hard crash that time.

I think for all the very rough edges that Bus Simulator 21 has, there is something deep down that is shining. It is hard to say everyone who’s ever played a game would enjoy it or be able to look past the several (hundred) issues though. Not that it is as bad as Cyberpunk 2077, if you can believe that? It has the grit of an indie-developed simulator attempting at least some depth, but maybe it is a little too large in scope for that team at this point. Some issues include optimization needing quite a bit of work and simple design elements such as that radial menu for all the bus actions.

Ultimately, I think I might be the only person to look past graphical issues and bugs on 8th generation hardware. You may not get that nostalgic feeling that you’d get from Omsi, where the squeak of a driver’s window sliding brings back the memory of a bus you once rode on. Even if the sound of everything in the bus jolting as I hit a curb or go through a pothole too quickly does bring back the same sound of public transport. Bus Simulator 21 is much more about the management side, growing an empire of buses as bendy as the sexuality of the people the rainbow flag cladding every bus represents. It is also about oddly enjoying something so dull that it is actually a job that can get you paid slightly higher than minimum wage.

I think the only reason I’ve stuck with Bus Simulator 21 and not jacked-in that whole writing thing here is that murder is slightly frowned upon. I’d also be fired day-1 for passive-aggressive or plainly aggressive behavior against passengers, telling them I’d kill them for handing over 20-quid. That’s what all these X, Y, and Z simulators are meant to be, little windows into the world you’d otherwise be unable to do. Somewhere under a myriad of imperfections is a shiny little ball of me passive-aggressively telling a passenger who just said, “I wonder where to next?” that I don’t know, “it is not as if I create the bus routes, is it?”

An Xbox One copy of Bus Simulator 21 was provided by Astragon for the purposes of this review.

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Bus Simulator 21

$34.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Oddly enjoyable.
• Gay bendy buses.
• Widespread maps that you expand over in career mode well enough.

Cons

• Low quality textures and lots of pop-in.
• Quite a few bugs.
• Shenmue who? I'm waiting for a bus here.
• The radial menu and being unable to remap.