TL;DP: Bus Driver

Sponsored By: Steam sale (I am ashamed.)

Behind schedule by: 51 minutes

Express Review

Hey-HEY! Come on over and have some fun with BUS DRIVER! All right! Let’s get ready to make some BUS money!

YAH YAH YAH YAH YAH!

Local Review

They’re like crack, you know? Those mundane simulators. You’ve seen the pushers on Steam and in the forums. Enabling unsuspecting people, giving them copies during sales, or sometimes not even during sales. Then they get you hooked.

And the next thing you know, you’re shopping for racing wheels and TrackIR headsets so you can pretend to drive a bus. Suddenly, a game you picked up for three dollars on sale is going to cost you two hundred. But it’s too late. You’ve already started ignoring your family, your job (This is my job now! I’m a street cleaner!). You catch your kids playing Viscera Cleanup Detail.

It was you, all right? They learned it by watching you!

Bus Driver is one of many high-fidelity simulators from SCS Software, makers of community favorite Euro Truck Simulator 2, and like ETS2, it’s a game who’s appeal is completely opaque until you start playing it.

The plot and premise are built into the title: There’s a bus; you drive it. I haven’t played enough of it to know if there’s a plot twist later on and I wind up driving a sedan chair for a level (coming soon from UIG Entertainment ...) but, somehow, I doubt it. Bus Driver is all about the bus. Big buses, school buses, municipal buses. If it’s big, hard to turn, and costs a couple dollars to ride, you’re piloting it. Unless it’s a Ferris wheel. Those have their own game.

Unlike other, more hardcore sims, this one doesn’t put you in the role of also managing a bus company. The bus routes you drive are set up as missions with pre-selected buses. The missions get progressively more difficult as you proceed along a tier, and the next tier is opened once you complete every route in the current tier. I realize that this is a downside to people who really wanted a chance to drive an authentic Micro Bird G5 Diesel. (Blue Bird: Confusing color-blind people since 1927!) If that bothers you, this might not be the sim for you.

The driving is much more gamey than your typical simulator. You start at point A, then proceed using the GPS to the next bus stop, which is highlighted on your screen like the yard marker in a modern NFL game. You stop in the highlighted box, open your doors to let all the people in (or out, if you want to be all legal about it. I swear, you bring one busload of people to Tijuana for a weekend and they never let you hear the end of it. So what if they were supposed to go to Michigan? It’s cold as a well digger’s bottom up there. I was doing them a favor!) and proceed to the next stop.

Your heads-up display has the aforementioned GPS, a clock to tell you how behind schedule you are, a speedometer, a passenger monitor (telling you how many passengers are sitting, standing, or in a foul mood) and an accelerometer. The most important part of the HUD is the accelerometer. If you brake too fast, your passengers will get angry and it will cost you points. The clock, on the other hand, you can pretty much ignore. I don’t know how many of you readers are from the Boston area, but this game lets you reenact the 66 bus schedule with no real penalty.

At the end of each route, you’re assessed penalties based on how late you are (minor penalties for minor delays), how many red lights you ran and how many times you made your passengers scream in terror (-120 points for braking too hard. -100 for running a red light. Hey, laws are one thing, but people need to get to the football stadium before the tailgaters run out of hot wings!). Of course, there are bonuses for safe drivers too (20 points for waiting for a green light. 10 points for going a whole mile without an accident. 10 points each time you properly use your blinker. Spam that blinker and change lanes a lot to maximize your score!)

As I mentioned, you don’t take much of a hit for being late. This is good to remember, because the timer settings for each leg of a given route are ridiculously short. If you start treating this like a checkpoint racer, you’re going to have a bad time.

Of course, the beauty of sims is that you don’t really have to care about the objectives if you really don’t want to. However, given that every other game on the market lets you treat traffic laws as a way to predict what the AI is going to do when you cross the median at relativistic speed, it’s refreshing to actually obey the law for once.

The sound design is bizarre. Oh, the standard hisses, pops and grinds that you associate with a proper municipal bus are all there in force, and the click-click-click of your blinkers is spot-on, and the bing-bong noise was enough to make me look around to make sure I hadn't missed my stop. But the less technical noises are odd. For example, when you complete a mission, a crowd of people who sound like they were locked in a bathroom with a microphone clap and cheer a little too enthusiastically. Presumably these voices represent your passengers, since they sound like the same people who scream like a cat on a manifold when you try to stop too short.

“Hooray! You didn't kill us this time! And we're only five minutes late! This is the best Fung Wah experience I've ever had!”

Like Euro Truck Simulator 2, this is a game that would benefit from a controller or wheel. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get the controller working. It recognizes the controller just fine, but it doesn't respond to either of the analog sticks. So you can do everything but turn, which I suppose means the Steam page blurb about "partial controller support" is 100% accurate. I'm sure there's a fix for it, but I haven't gotten around to finding it.

As you might imagine, searching for “Bus driver controller not responding” doesn't give you the most useful results.

Control issues aside, this is a surprisingly fun game. It gives you some of that ETS2 vibe but in bite-sized chunks that you can start and finish in fifteen minutes or less. Personally, I'd like to see a mode where you run a single route for a full day, and maybe that's a mode that I haven't unlocked yet (fingers crossed!). For now, the arcade-style sim is clicking with me.

Will you use the Charlie Card?

I can see myself returning often enough to make that worth it. It's not really a game for marathoning, but it satisfies that “I have ten minutes to spare, and I don't feel like playing Broforce just this minute” feeling.

Does this bus go to Majula?

No. I'm sure later levels ramp the difficulty up, but for the first hour, the hardest part was writing this review without making a reference to Speed.

(pause)

DAMN!

Comments

Ha! Nice write up, as always.

I loves me some Bus Driver. Looks primitive on the surface, but I still think it's one of SCS Software's hidden gems.

Too bad your controller didn't work. Game works just fine (sticks and all) with my 360 pad.

Oh, and side note: Street Cleaning Simulator is pretty kick ass. I just had to pick it up after watching a few Let's Play vids on YouTube. (I'll see myself out.)

Lol. Your pop and real life references were just as funny as the article. Good job.

Hah, this is great.

It's worth mentioning, lest people get the wrong idea about the general quality of SCS games, that Bus Driver is an older game (2008). ETS2 is so dramatically improved that you wouldn't even know they were from the same company just by playing them.

Anybody who has an inkling that they might like some sort of commercial vehicle driving simulator generally (rather than buses specifically) should just play ETS2 instead. Bus Driver is worse in every possible way, except in the way that it has buses and ETS2 does not.

I should also mention that SCS has been sneaking bus-related infrastructure into ETS2 map updates for a while now, so it seems likely we'll finally get the modern Bus Driver followup we've all been waiting for, maybe in the form of an ETS2 expansion.

Thing is, I don't even look at Bus Driver and Euro Truck Simulator as the same genre.

The former is an arcade game and the latter more of a sim.

Both are great at what they set out to do.

That's true. However, I kind of attributed that to when/where the "commercial vehicle simulator" genre was at the time it was made.

To me, BD feels kind of dated and weird specifically because it was trying so hard to be a video game. To me it feels like the arcade-y nature of Bus Driver was an evolutionary step on the way towards making a "better" sim.

But maybe this just highlights a schism between the hard core commercial vehicle simulator fans who want all the physics and all the details, versus the casual audience who just wants to pick up a controller and complete a quick route.

I can see the leap you're talking about.

I do think it's possible to be a fan of both schools of design, however. I personally love both takes. Though I do admittedly appreciate and enjoy what ETS2 does more, I still think Bus Driver kicks ass.

The presentation, score tracking & menu overlays remind me of those old SEGA sit-down arcade units like Daytona (only a slow-paced version :p ). Graphics are clean and inviting too, esp. with at the settings cranked to 11.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/RuDHK7y.jpg?1)

gore wrote:

That's true. However, I kind of attributed that to when/where the "commercial vehicle simulator" genre was at the time it was made.

To me, BD feels kind of dated and weird specifically because it was trying so hard to be a video game. To me it feels like the arcade-y nature of Bus Driver was an evolutionary step on the way towards making a "better" sim.

But maybe this just highlights a schism between the hard core commercial vehicle simulator fans who want all the physics and all the details, versus the casual audience who just wants to pick up a controller and complete a quick route.

I think of it kind of like how I think of Carcassone or Munchkin when it comes to the Boardgames-that-aren't-made-by-Milton-Bradley genre. They're introductory games that give the player a glimpse into a world that looks strange and wondrous and full of little fiddly bits and lots of moving parts without scaring the player away because oh-my-gosh-they-have-a-stat-to-track-wear-and-tear-on-boots.

Dip your toe into Bus Driver and one day you may find yourself plowing the fields of Tuscany.