For a long time, fans of public transit gaming had very slim pickings. You either stuck with older titles or moved over to the highly praised Bus Bound
. Now, publisher Astragon is stepping back into the ring with Bus Simulator 27. However, there is a major shift behind the scenes. The original creators have moved on, and development was handed over to Simteract, a studio mostly known for their polarizing work on games like Taxi Life
.
Does this new developer manage to deliver the ultimate transit experience, or is this game stuck at a red light. After spending plenty of time behind the wheel, managing routes, and dealing with virtual passengers, here is everything you need to know before buying.
Instead of mapping out a boring, real world European city on a 1:1 scale, the developers opted for a completely fictional location called Felicia Bay. Loosely inspired by the sunny coasts of Southern Spain, the map is an absolute treat to look at. You get a fantastic mix of palm trees, beaches, dense industrial zones, and sprawling highways.
Building a fictional map was a smart choice. It allows the world to be dense and interesting without feeling repetitive. Driving through these diverse districts actually feels like you are on a working holiday, making the core loop of picking up and dropping off passengers much more enjoyable.
If you love hardware, this game is going to impress you. The roster boasts over 45 buses from 13 fully licensed brands, including heavy hitters like Volvo, Scania, and Mercedes Benz. You get everything from standard city transit vehicles to massive coaches and double deckers. The audio is spot on, too—an electric bus hums quietly, while a heavy diesel coach rumbles aggressively.
The level of interactivity inside the cockpit is staggering. You have to manually log into your terminal, turn on the ignition, manage the air conditioning (passengers will complain if it gets too hot), operate the lights, and lower the ramps for wheelchair users. Thankfully, all these controls are easily accessed via a clean radial menu, making it highly playable whether you use a mouse, a controller, or a racing wheel.
One massive quality of life improvement: the game ditches the tedious cash and coin mechanics of older games. Passengers now strictly use cards for their fares, making ticketing fast, simple, and far less annoying.
The management side of the game lets you build a company from scratch. You hire drivers, assign them to routes, and purchase new vehicles. The absolute best feature here is that your hired drivers actually appear in the game world. Sitting at a red light and watching an AI driver wearing your company's uniform pass by on a route you created is incredibly satisfying.
The game also throws random events at you. You might encounter broken traffic lights, roadwork, or passengers causing trouble. Sometimes people play music too loudly, refuse to wake up at their stop, or simply block the doors. While this sounds great on paper, having to stand up, leave the driver's seat, and scold a virtual passenger every ten minutes gets old very quickly.
Here is where the game hits a massive pothole. In a game entirely focused on driving rules, the AI traffic needs to be competent. In Bus Simulator 27, the AI is a complete disaster. Cars will pull out in front of you for no reason, freeze in the middle of busy intersections, and cause gridlocks that never resolve. Sometimes vehicles just vanish or morph into a completely different car right in front of your eyes.
This wouldn't be so bad if the game didn't financially penalize you for the AI's mistakes. If a glitchy car slides backward into your bus, you get slapped with a massive fine. It makes trying to play properly an exercise in total frustration.
On top of the terrible AI, the game suffers from severe optimization issues. Players on high end PCs will notice massive frame drops and overheating after a couple of hours of playtime. The visual effects also need work. The rain, for example, completely coats your windshield in a way that makes it impossible to see the road, and the wipers barely help. Strangely, despite the heavy rain, the pedestrians walking the streets never use umbrellas.
- Massive, highly detailed fleet of licensed buses.
- Felicia Bay is a beautiful, sunny, and vibrant map.
- Incredible level of cockpit interactivity and control.
- Hired AI drivers physically appear in the game world.
- Card only ticket system removes the annoyance of giving exact change.
- Brain dead AI traffic completely ruins the driving experience.
- Unfair penalty system that punishes the player for AI mistakes.
- Performance issues, including crashes and frame rate stuttering.
- Annoying passenger events occur way too frequently.
- Rain effects severely blind the driver.
"Bus Simulator 27 has a fantastic foundation, a beautiful world, and great buses. However, the terrible AI traffic and technical bugs hold it back from greatness. Hardcore fans will find things to love, but casual players should wait for a few major patches before buying a ticket."
