After over 100 hours spent servicing the streets of Bus Simulator 21; I was unsurprisingly keen to get stuck in immediately upon the release of Bus Bound, the new entry from developer Stillalive Studios. You’ll note the lack of the word ‘simulator’ from the title for this new game, as a lot of that element from Stillalive’s last offering has been stripped out in favour of adding alternative content to the franchise. Unfortunately in my experience the changes introduce nothing but problems.

Taking place in the fictional town of Emberville, a fraction of the size of just one Bus Simulator 21 map, you are set immediately to work in the game’s modest world. While a less sprawling, shrunken down driving space isn’t necessarily a bad thing I found myself frustrated early on with the lack of variety on display. The game looks presentable enough graphically, but as so many streets are indistinguishable from each other, I can’t help but feel more effort could have gone into what we have as there was so much less of it to design.

The amount of buses available is also smaller than the list from Bus Simulator 21, and while I found most of them handled quite differently in the last game, in Bus Bound they are all very much the same aside from throttle sensitivity and braking power. Where I used to flit between several different buses depending on the route I had planned, now I just drive the same one or two because they’re indisputably better and less of a chore to maneuver than the others.

I was pleased at first to discover minor events happening on my travels, such as a car on fire or roadworks blocking a lane, but was dismayed to find these events are always happening in these locations. More than once I remembered upon turning a particular corner that a truck would be blocking my lane, and sure enough there it still was, in-game days after I had first encountered it.

The bugs I experienced were fairly innocuous for the most part, though more than once my bus did freak out and stop dead upon hitting an invisible object my crystal ball did not alert me to. I like that the sound design has been overhauled since Bus Simulator 21, but it took me far too long to realise the truck / train horn that randomly obnoxiously blares is mere set dressing and not directed at me for something I had or had not done. The jarring crunch of metal hitting curbstone was accurate if unwelcome, especially as more often than not the game would use it when I had not in fact touched the curb I was pulling up to.

I appreciate one key distinction setting Bus Bound apart from Bus Simulator 21, in that passengers no longer have to purchase tickets from you at each stop. The accompanying downside to this however is now there is no interaction at all with passengers, aside from their snide remarks if you make a mistake, or their uninhibited passive-aggression when you do something well, such as stopping at a stop sign.

This brought with it the double-edged sword that as there is no money element at all in the game to be saved up, the sole punishment for errors made is you get less public support, making future unlocks take longer to achieve. I realised if more than one thing went wrong on a route it was in my best interest to power through to the end as fast and dangerously as possible, incurring even more penalties in order to start a new route with freshly reinstated high customer satisfaction.

The only other positive I can find in the stripped back simulation model is that I’m no longer chastised for pulling away from a bus stop seconds before the door closing animation had finished, which I cannot say I will ever miss. I also like how I can drive into pedestrians dawdling on zebra crossings as they just phase through the bus with no penalty. Whether that’s a point in the game’s favour or not, I am unsure.

It felt to me that all the cars in the game must have been programmed by real world Audi drivers, as I found the AI traffic nothing short of abysmal. More than once I received a lower approval rating from passengers because cars crashed into me that I could not avoid, even while stationary at bus stops. I also found the road layout and traffic light systems inconsistent and plagued with issues. Too often I’d wait an interminable amount of time for a red light to change, only for oncoming traffic to be greenlit at the same time, causing gridlock in the street I was trying to travel down.

The infuriating lack of a minimap or modern satellite navigation, forcing you to follow arrows hovering over the road you’re on, was both immersion breaking and pure bad game design. A meter that fills on the right side of the screen dictating how close you are to your next stop was often hard to read at a glance, particularly with my eyes constantly scouring the distance for red traffic lights I kept missing in my early hours on the game. A simple map would have been much more helpful than this, and I cannot fathom how anyone could think otherwise.

With three expansions set to release through this year, it is clear Bus Bound would have benefited from delaying its release until they could release with the skeleton of a game we have here. I will return to and re-review the game once all three expansions, and no doubt the waves of bug fixes needed, have been patched in, so for now I score it

5 / 10

Written, edited and images captured by Alexx.

Game code provided by publisher.