As you level up, you get access to variety of different buses.
The second thing you do with money is buy buses.
Each driver gets their own little info blurb, and costs the player a certain amount of money a week to maintain. You use this money to expand your bus empire in a variety of different ways.įirst off, you can hire drivers. After you’ve driven a route, the money you made on that route is extrapolated out for a week period, and you have earnings. As the manager, you create bus routes going through several stops, and then you drive the routes. So, at a high level, here’s how the management systems worked in Bus Simulator 18. This part is what got me excited, as I’m a big fan of economic systems in games and trying to make them as efficient as possible. Even so, that didn’t stop cars from almost plowing into me in the middle of intersections, which ends up being really frustrating.Īt the higher level of gameplay, the player acts as a manager for the entire bus company as it expands throughout Seaside Valley. The good in this is that the game seems to prioritize your bus over all other traffic, so you generally don’t have to worry about sitting at a four-way stop for 10 minutes.
I don’t generally expect simulator games to use hyper-realistic traffic models, but the drivers in the fictional town of Seaside Valley appeared to have no idea how traffic is supposed to work, as they pretty much just do whatever they want. It took me a while to figure out that there was a button in the menu to reset my bus to the road, which may serve as an indication of a bug the developers couldn’t quite work out. Occasionally, taking a turn too tight and bumping certain objects could phase the bus inside them, making it impossible to move or get out. Every time you bump into something you shouldn’t, the game penalizes you, especially if it’s people (imagine that). The bus moves responsively and more complicated maneuvers require thought and precision (like turning, roundabouts, etc.), and the challenges the game sets before you are easy enough to manage without getting overwhelmed. Overall, the actual driving of the bus was more good than bad. Personally, I found myself focusing a lot more on being perfect because I didn’t want to compromise my earnings at the end of the route.
It’s a simple model, but it works effectively. Signaled before turning into the bus stop? Great! Hit the speed bump too fast? Not great. At the end of the drive, you get paid out based on a pretty simple equation: all the good stuff you did minus all the bad stuff you did. The game throws a lot of curve balls at you while driving, such as fare dodgers, passengers listening to loud music, speeding cameras, and some absurdly placed potholes. You control pretty much everything on the bus, so you must dispense tickets, open and close the doors, and even extend the wheelchair ramp when required. You take the driver’s seat in a bus and drive it around town, picking up and dropping off passengers. No surprise there, it is there in the title of the game. At the lowest level, it’s about driving buses. As someone who finds the idea of driving a bus in real life particularly un-fun, I was genuinely curious how a game could go about turning such a menial, job-like task into something interesting and replayable.īus Simulator 18 has a couple of different levels to its gameplay.
Given my own feelings about simulators as a genre, I was intrigued by this trailer. When I first saw Bus Simulator 18, it was in the form of their over-the-top multiplayer trailer, featuring four very excitable people having way too much fun driving buses around town.