Bus Bound PS5 Review. Hail to the bus driver, bus driver, bus driver, bus driver. Hail to the bus driver bus driver man. Bus Bound is a simulation game developed by Stillalive Studios, where precision and rule-following are crucial to success. If your fantasy in life is to ride 20 ton behemoths through bustling (get it, cos you’re driving a bus) city streets all the while taking stock of the rules of the road while satisfying your passengers, Bus Bound will fit your jive neatly.
Bus Bound Review (PS5)-Strictly Bus-ness
Welcome to the City of Emberville, the lively and oh so busy berg where the importance of a daily commute is crucial to citizens, and ensuring their satisfaction runs hand-in-hand with success. Following traffic laws and signs are imperative to ensuring patrons are safe and secure as they travel to their destinations. Unlike its sim-heavy contemporaries, Bus Bound is all about tweaking infrastructure and designating routes for the purposes of improving operations throughout the city.
Your job in Bus Bound isn’t just to ensure that citizens have a reliable and safe journey, as you’re also tasked with ensuring a rival company called SE Auto doesn’t get its own way because they want you to fail, presumably because they want the public to use other modes of transport to get around-but you won’t let them win will you? SE Auto likely hates the mere thought of a pedestrian because seeing a person walking down a street and waiting at a bus stop rattles their emotional cages. Well we gotta rattle em even more!
Bus Management Breakdown
Bus Bound boasts a friendly and efficient approach to bus simulation will tempt many wannabe bus drivers to hop on board. There’s a pleasant and likeable energy to Bus Bound, and this is nudged along by the catalog of 17 buses you can get behind the wheel of, and the ways Emberville will evolve as you make concrete waves through the game.
As buses become more crucial, Emberville will germinate with more zones and districts for buses including bus-only areas that guarantee a flood of passengers at every bus stop. Strategy and planning can be utilized to maximize potential when using the route editor, which opens up a myriad of options for players to customize their planned transit system.
Furthermore, it is of the utmost importance that passengers are happy and they depart at bus stops with green smiley faces and don’t stagnate the journey with red frowny faces. How you go about gaining more customer satisfaction is simple-don’t be reckless and always follow the rules.
So what are the rules and how do you follow them? Supposing you’ve flunked bus driving school, you’ll need to adhere to speed limits, road signs, traffic stops, and you’ll need to tuck your bus very tidily into every stop. Doing all of this may take you a little bit of time, especially if you’ve been weened on open world sandbox games like GTA and Saints Row. You cannot divebomb into corners laying waste to innocent lamp posts, nor should you choose to ignore traffic lights and risk a T-bone collision like you were playing a Burnout game. Be careful, be cognizant, and be a trustworthy bus driver-it shouldn’t be as complicated as aerospace engineering.
Getting A Handle On Things
The fleet of buses you control are a varied bunch. With 17 unique rides to take control of with varying capabilities, there is plenty of diversity on offer. Like a class of children in a school, some of the 17 buses are harder get along with than others.
For example, the Bluebird Sigma is one bus type you may dread getting behind the wheel of as it demands exact precision cornering, handling more like a gigantic lorry through narrow streets. Conversely, the 30 and 40 foot models are easier to manage and won’t so easily necessitate hard agonizing turns. When you’ve got a job to do, it’s not ideal to be stuck on a set of wheels you can barely get a grip on, yet if you want a greater challenge navigating the road networks of Emberville, then there are a few buses that’ll cater for your needs.
Besides vehicle handling, the weather is another important factor in Bus Bound. Conditions can change instantly and you must adapt to it. Heavy rain demands immense focus and your bus will react convincingly with the terrain in these slippery conditions by being generally harder to control, and windscreen vision will be obscured by rain, so using the wipers will help you out and increase the chances of a safe and satisfying journey for all aboard.
Weathering Heights
Bus sim fans might bemoan the more casual approach Bus Bound offers when compared to genre staples, leaning to a more streamlined and lighter alternative to the traditional technical-heavy bus simulation titles. You can’t roam outside of your vehicle, you aren’t in-charge of handling passenger fares, and the driving style is far more accessible and free from manual handling. You might call Bus Bound sim-lite due to its more approachable leanings, even if some of the better aspects of the hardcore sims have been omitted.
Repetition is a consistent theme in Bus Bound, which on the one hand might appear like a big weakness, but on the other it is a management-style experience where you’re working to effectively turn Emberville into Busburg. Hardcore sim nuts will dislike the toned down authenticity and the lack of challenge, while newcomers may grow stale of the grind. Bus Bound does fit comfortably into a niche where it is gentler than its competition, but it isn’t about holding your hand either. Embrace the gameplay loop and you’ll find plenty of mileage, and if you don’t then you may not find lasting appeal here.
On the audio-visual front there’s nothing horrendous or even sub-par here. The buses look great and much better than the sterile environments surrounding them on the road. Wet weather looks passable, but the impact it has on your driving says much more than the visual appeal of it ever could.
As for the audio, your Bus Bound mentor is on hand to give you tips and encouragement but his voice does become grating, as does the female guide who instructs you as you navigate menus. Vehicle sounds are unremarkable as the traffic roving past sounds monotone and dull, as do the sound of the buses.
If you’re after an accessible and welcoming bus simulation title, Bus Bound fits the bill in a serviceable fashion. Riding buses, collecting passengers and managing routes are all well implemented, and the handling of each vehicle makes each journey slightly different. Hardcore sim fans may be displeased with the lack of esoteric manual features and the inability to walk outside of the buses, but ultimately Bus Bound is a welcome aboard for anybody who wants a sim offering without the torturous nitty gritty technical graft.
Bus Bound is out now on PS5, Xbox Series S/X and PC.
Review copy was generously provided by the publisher.