Bus Bound Review — Thank Your Driver

In case you somehow didn’t know, there exists an entire world of simulation games out there. Technically, every game is a simulation of something, but this particular genre focuses less on delivering over-the-top fantastical adventures and opts instead to deliver a grounded, straightforward simulation of what many might call mundane tasks and fantasies that are certainly possible, but which often require a serious dedication of time, often to the point that they require you to build an entire career around them. Most people, when developing a passing curiosity about a job or field of study, would much rather play a video game about it in their free time, and no publisher has captured the imagination of these curious players more than Saber Interactive.

Now, thanks to the folks at Saber, you can experience an entirely new fantasy: bus driving, making the commute on one of our most valuable sources of public transportation through a fictional American city, with some very American traffic along the way. Bus Bound is the latest title published by Saber that seeks to immerse you in this vitally important role, but key decisions made during development may leave players disappointed, as it neither fully commits to an economy sim nor is as immersive as it could have been for pure simulation enthusiasts.

Mechanically speaking, Bus Bound is incredibly straightforward. You select a route, select the bus you wish to drive on it, and drive. Simulated traffic and your own ability to drive a massive bus dictate your performance, with your passengers approving of safe driving and disapproving of risky behavior and accidents. The keyboard controls are fine, as they are not the best keyboard driving I’ve ever experienced, but are certainly passable, and to unlock anything you simply need to play the game. There is no economy system, so there’s no buying anything; all unlocks are made based on how many routes you drive.

The traffic simulation is great, and I appreciate that things aren’t always as mundane as they are in other games. Trailers will be parked halfway into the street, and people will run stoplights and lurch into traffic, but it’s a rare occurrence that seems intentionally designed to simulate real-world traffic, rather than the driving AI being bad at what it does.

The city itself is rather small, and you can drive from one end to the other in about ten minutes. This quickly fights the illusion of a large simulated city, but you won’t notice it as much if you’re just driving routes.

This is where the game gets divisive, taking a weird middle ground that doesn’t fully appeal to the two core audiences it’s marketed to.

If you like economic sims where you build a business from the ground up, Bus Bound is obviously not for you. There is no money to be earned, and no business to build. Everything is unlocked just by driving, which makes it seem less like a simulation game and more like an arcadey bus-driving game.

However, the title also fails to fully lean into its immersive side. Again, the map is small, and there are little to no immersive features to really make you feel like a bus driver: you don’t get in and out of the bus, you don’t have shifts, and you don’t unlock more responsibilities by doing your job right. Instead, again, the game feels like an arcade game, where you are tasked with simply getting the best score possible while driving your bus along its route. It’s like an incredibly watered-down, rules-abiding Crazy Taxi.

It would be easy to argue that Bus Bound feels half-baked. What is present in the game is nice, but not the most captivating or evolved of driving mechanics, mainly relying on its solid traffic AI to sell the experience to you. Again, the map is small, and the actual gameplay loop feels baffling when considering the audience that would play the game. Again, all there is to do in Bus Bound is to drive your routes and get as many positive reviews as possible along the way: that might sound like all you need for a bus-driving game, but it lacks some critical nuance that sets the simulator genre apart from others.

On top of that, I was just simply surprised by how poorly the game runs. The graphics are fine, but the title took a full ten minutes just to load its shaders on my fairly advanced gaming rig. On top of that, it failed to detect DX12 on my computer when I first tried to open it, prompting a restart. I simply wasn’t sure what the game was trying to portray graphically that would need that much dedication.

Overall, if all you care about is actually driving the bus and stopping for passengers along your route, you could do much worse than Bus Bound. While it lacks the nuance of other simulator games, it still provides a fun, albeit short, experience that won’t take you more than 10 hours to complete. I would recommend picking the game up on sale, as I think $30 is a little steep for what the title has to offer, and I would also temper your expectations if you’re assuming this game plays similarly to other Saber-published simulation games. It’s a game about driving a bus, and that might be all you need.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of Bus Bound. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Bus Bound is available on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation.