Once you’ve levelled up all stops in a district, the district level will increase too. Serving bus stops by driving routes yourself also provides them with experience, and with this experience you can level up the bus stop to allow more routes to serve the stop. But, once you get used to it, you’ll be flying from stop to stop.Ĭompleting routes yourself increases the performance of your employees on the same route when you’re driving elsewhere, so it’s a system that works quite well in encouraging you to drive a variety of different routes and explore the map. Using a controller takes a bit of getting used to as certain controls are tucked away in the radial menu, and I had a bunch of issues in attempting to set up my steering wheel. While the buses feel like heavy, lumbering vehicles that, you’ll especially notice when you switch to a larger bus that has a worse turning circle, the controls can be fiddly. The lighting for example, seems to either be overly bright or barely visible, while simple quality-of-life improvements like dynamic dashboards would be a nice addition so you could easily see the open/close status of the doors.ĭriving the buses themselves is a bit hit-and-miss.
While the buses are nicely modelled with clickable switches, there are a few bits that let them down. Keeping with the times, there are also a number of electric buses too. Naturally you’ll start off in small, single deck buses before moving onto larger bendy-buses and, for the first time in the series, late game you’ll unlock the Alexander Dennis double-decker bus (think of your typical red London bus). With 30 officially licensed buses, there’s plenty to choose from. Keeping to timetable is equally important, although I rarely found it to be something I was worried about as the scheduling is quite generous, and you can adjust the travel times and dwell times at bus stops if you need to too. On the flip side, you’ll lose points for speeding, hitting potholes, clipping the kerb or stopping in a bad position at bus stops. Obeying traffic lights, avoiding other vehicles and pedestrians is obviously what you’d expect to do as a minimum, but you also get extra points for good driving such as using indicators correctly or ‘kneeling’ the bus to allow passengers to board and alight more easily. It has still managed to provide a more authentic sim experience, and a few patches will only make this all the better.While buying buses and creating routes for your company is a key part of the game, the main emphasis remains on driving the routes yourself. Even so, Stillalive Studios seems to be on the right path here.
For better or worse, veterans of the last entry will find a lot of familiarity in terms of the vehicle roster, and the second map which is just Bus Sim 18’s Seaside Valley all over again (albeit with the new route-building toolset, but it’s noticeably less visually detailed than Angel Shores). Perhaps some further optimization is needed, as a colleague of mine noticed similarly choppy performance on an even more capable machine.ĭespite these caveats, Bus Simulator 21 is still a step in the right direction for the series. Playing with settings did help a bit, but it’s not as smooth as I was expecting. Yet, taking control of a bus always resulted in the framerate immediately tanking to the 40fps range, and sometimes lower. When not driving, the sim would hit a solid 60fps (v-synced) on my rig with an RTX 2060 and Core i7.
While I did sing its praises for its graphical fidelity, Bus Simulator 21 seems to be a little heavy-handed on the resource requirements. But what really interrupts this otherwise sweet ride is the sim’s performance.
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