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Bus Simulator 21 attracted me, since many moons ago, I loved driving around in buses in Midtown Madness 3, but not as a bus is meant to be driven, since I acted like I was in the Keanu Reeves movie, Speed.
As you begin, select your player and customise their hair, skin tone, size, etc., then pick a company, but first, you have to create one! So, that allows for multiple profiles within a game, so if you have more than one person in your house, they can take shifts!
You’ll start off in Angel Shores, before moving on to other areas, and the game allows for setting a level of experience which gives options such as Day Tripper (easy mode), Drive Purist (realistic driving, so you’re expected to know a bit about what you’re doing), Commissioner (like Day Tripper, but with realistic features only) and Hardcode (all controls are manual, so if you’ve never driven a bus and don’t want to look like a goof on the road, avoid this one at first!)
In addition, there’s a sandbox mode, so you can drive about with gay abandon!
There’s a million things to get to grips with, from opening and closing doors, putting down the wheelchair ramp, ensuring no people get blocked in the doors before moving on, selling tickets, etc.
However, what I wasn’t expecting is that after a couple of runs in the bus, I started a third outing and was told to park my bus by the terminal, and choose a new one to buy if I wanted to… However, I was in the middle of the street, and the bus was nowhere to be found. I ran round to the terminal, with the only option being to buy a new bus which I couldn’t afford… I ended up running into the street, and commandeering another driver’s bus!!
I’ve also had a few trips on the PS5 so far, and will play some more, including the Timecop spoof you see on here!
Overall, so far (so, call this a ‘first impressions’ if you like), I’m not very good at Bus Simulator 21, but I can’t shake that feeling of Midtown Madness 3 with this, and it does that brilliantly.
However, there are those glitches that need sorting out, but those tend to happen after the game has been released, so we’ll see how things go.
In fact, even after I do crash into a load of things, another glitch is that the trainer lady doesn’t pull me up on any of this. She just enthuses about how brilliant I’m doing.
Finally for now, I can’t seem to find a way to invert the Y-axis on my controller for the PC, which is very annoying if that’s not possible, since looking up while pushing up is counterintuitive to me. I did find it on the PS5, though, although when I went back to the PC, I *still* can’t find it!
Anyhoo, enjoy the videos including an 11-hour livestream! I’ll add that as a separate video below, alongside my Timecop spoof.
Overall: 7/10
Bus Simulator 21 is out now on PS4, PC/Steam and Xbox One.
Important info:
- Developer: stillalive studios
- Publisher: astragon Entertainment
- Players: single-player, multi-player
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.