Bus Simulator 18 review (Xbox One): The wheels on the bus

Get your coins ready and hop aboard, Bus Simulator 18 has been released on Xbox One and PS4. Here’s the official A Tribe Called Cars review.

You know the expression about wanting a bus and there isn’t one and then suddenly two turn up at once? Well, don’t expect the same of bus simulators as this is the latest and only recent option.

Bus Simulator 18 may seem familiar because it’s been out on PC since 2018 but only now (as of the 17th of September 2019 release date) can you buy it on Xbox One and PS4. I’m testing it on the Microsoft console.

Funnily enough, the premise of Bus Simulator 18 is to give you a taste of bus company ownership. That includes not crashing into cars and telling passengers to turn down the volume of their noisy headphones. But not cleaning up vomit or telling racists to get off, as it turns out.

You’re the bus company owner and it’s up to you to make a go of it. From the physical process of driving the buses to setting up new bus routes and hiring and firing new drivers, you can expect to get a hefty taste of the business. DiRT Rally 2.0, this most certainly isn’t.

During the opening tutorial, it seems like the developer is trying to park a double decker-sized amount of information inside your head, but the overwhelming number of buttons you need to remember paves the way to a half-decent experience. One where driving a bus is actually pleasant.

It helps that the control method is mostly logical in its default state. Indicating right, for instance, is done with the RB button and left is LB. There’s also an action wheel of commands, accessed by pressing left on the D-Pad, where you can find everything you need if you get forgetful.

Alternatively you can look round the physical cockpit in first-person view as the driver, which is how I roll for the lesser-used commands such as the headlights. It’s a satisfying approach that, when combined with the realistic engine note and weightiness of each bus when driving, comes across as realistic. Not quite Flight Simulator realistic, but not a million miles away.

Make enough in fares and you can add another bus to the fleet, complete with a driver you have hired of your own choosing. Said driver and bus can then run a bus route of your creation, generating money. Rinse and repeat until you become the bus king (and not busking) with an armada of passenger-carrying lumps of metal.

Just to keep things interesting, you can also personalise the buses, all officially licensed from actual bus makers such as MAN and Iveco, with paintjobs, decals and other visual bits and bobs as you unlock them. Sometimes this is simply done by gaining experience and progressing up a level.

If you tire of your pink and gold bus with stripes (you tasteful beast, you), advertising can be stuck on the side instead, generating a modest weekly income. Which you’ll need if you accidentally drive into a passenger and get charged 20,000 to resolve the situation. Ahem.

For the first hour or so, I was struggling to not kerb the bus, get caught speeding (use the speed limiter!) and mow down pedestrians (use your eyes!). Then it becomes more a case of tweaking each bus route and driving in different conditions and learning to go out wide before turning in to avoid paying for lamppost repairs. But still crashing into the odd person.

Not one bit of Bus Simulator 18‘s gameplay is especially exciting. However, it is strangely rewarding and for some reason you keep on delivering passengers around the fictional city, 5.8 square miles in size, to see what’s round the corner. Even after reuniting a passenger with his lost belongings and clearing up the 1,000th discarded paper cup.

Having a combination of the physical driving and the management side of bus company life makes Bus Simulator 18 feel more complete and satisfying, even though the pace of gameplay is like being on a bus itself; slow and predominantly uneventful.

You can make use of up to four-player multiplayer, which is probably going to become a great deal of fun if you take a Destruction Derby-based approach to driving. But you would need three friends with the game and that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Bus Simulator 18: Worth buying, then?

Bus Simulator 18 is not without its share of flaws beyond the core gameplay. The character animations are rubbish, the Unreal 4 graphics a little basic, the resolution of the rear-view mirrors pixellated, the passenger speech boringly repetitive, the map too small and there are too few buses to buy.

All of these things plus the repitition of simply delivering passengers from A to B means that Bus Simulator 18 reaches the end of the line sooner than hoped. Still, they say it’s the journey that counts, not the final destination, and the ride is more enjoyable than you would think.