There’s a certain bravery involved in making a bus driving simulator. Most people spend their daily commute desperately trying to avoid eye contact and wondering why the driver’s taken a route apparently designed by a drunk sat nav. Bus Bound takes that experience and says, “What if you were responsible for this misery?”
Gaming Heaven
To its credit, the city itself is actually quite nice to look at. There’s a decent sense of life in the world, with pedestrians wandering about and traffic clogging roads exactly as nature intended. The map’s surprisingly large too, which gives you plenty of opportunities to get lost while trying to remember whether stop 14 was the one near the bakery or the suspiciously identical office block.
There’s also a mildly relaxing quality to it all at first. Pottering about in a bus while soft ambient noise hums away can be oddly calming, right up until your passengers start moaning because you touched a speed bump at 19mph instead of 18.
Gaming Hell
To say the bus handling’s a bit ropey is an understatement. Instead of feeling like a massive bus with actual weight behind it, vehicles twitch about like shopping trolleys with one dodgy wheel. Steering feels absurdly sensitive while braking has all the urgency of a pension queue.
Progression is equally baffling. Early shifts end almost immediately, meaning you spend more time loading menus than actually driving. You’ll finally settle into a route and suddenly the game goes, “Right, shift over, off you pop.”
And despite all the talk of relaxing gameplay, AI traffic behaves like everyone in the city learned to drive from bumper cars at Dreamland.
Final Judgement
Bus Bound has moments where it almost captures the quiet charm of public transport simulation. Unfortunately, awkward controls, inconsistent systems and repetitive structure send the whole thing straight into the depot.
