There is something deeply cathartic about job sims. The idea of getting lost in something rote where your mind can wander while your hands stay busy is a pleasant one, and I always look forward to the next job sim on my list. I want to have these quiet moments, puttering through a city, with no obligations but those which I have imposed upon myself.
The problem is, I pulled up City Bus Simulator 2024, the absolute madlad of driving job sims. It is a beast of pure chaos, and I made the foolish decision to strap myself to its back.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3342896976
City Bus Simulator 2024 is, in theory, a bus driving simulator. You play as a faceless, voiceless bus driver, driving a bus through the streets of “New York,” picking up passengers, and shuttling everyone safely to their destinations. It’s a familiar concept for anyone who has spent any time in the driving sim genre.
Similarly to other games in the genre, City Bus Simulator 2024 has both a driving mode and a longer-term career mode, where players can invest in buying new buses for their bus company, hiring drivers, and becoming veritable titans of the bus industry. The career mechanics provide incentives for players to drive and redrive routes, hoping to gather enough money to buy a shiny, new bus, or to customise the ones already in their fleet.
The best elements of City Bus Simulator 2024 can be found in this career mode. The menu for career mode features a very cute dog, and the buses look beautiful as they roll out of the garage. There’s a variety of paint colours available for the buses that give a unique look and feel for each one, even if the price points make customisation a mid-game expenditure at best.
That is the sum total of what works about City Bus Simulator 2024. The rest of the game is a masterclass in failing at the simple concept of driving a bus through a city.
City Bus Simulator 2024, like many driving sims, seeks to capture a certain degree of verisimilitude in its driving experience. Opening up the control panel shows a dizzying array of buttons mapping everything from the horn to the turn signals to the air conditioning panel. There is a clear dedication here to trying to provide as much of the bus driver experience as possible, down to the minuscule details.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3342897497
This attention to all the details makes it even more obvious when the elements of the game that one might believe are more critical are so fundamentally and deeply flawed as to render the game nigh unplayable.
Take, for example, the act of driving the bus. One of the key elements of a driving game is that the vehicle be fun to drive and capture at least some element of driving the real-life equivalent. The buses in City Bus Simulator 2024 follow this same principle, as long as by “follow this principle,” the devs mean “not that.” The buses handle with all the grace and dexterity of a toddler charging down a steep hill. A key press can send the bus hurtling towards its destination at escape velocity or do nothing at all. Turning can be smooth and elegant, or it can result in getting irreparably stuck on a pole with no option but to restart the entire route. Driving the bus is a zen-like exercise in patience and recognition of our own powerlessness. The bus does what the bus wants, and we are but passengers in its gullet.
Even when the bus is running properly, the actual act of trying to navigate a route is its own exercise in futility. City Bus Simulator 2024 advertises itself as having a range of routes through a variety of landscapes. In actuality, however, these routes do not exist, with the player instead being shunted to drive loops through the same poorly rendered cityscape over and over again. The same bizarre humanoid figures appear at the same bus stops, staring blankly into the bus, threatening to report the driver to some unknown entity, as they pay for the bus in weird denominations of coins. There is something deeply unsettling about the world of City Bus Simulator 2024, where a route that describes itself as navigating through hills and scenic forests instead turns into the same city block populated by men wearing suit tops and bright orange shorts, boarding the bus one after the other, making careful eye contact with the driver.
Assuming, of course, you get to the stop at all. In an act of what could charitably be called self-preservation, it is surprisingly difficult to move your bus to a bus stop and actually pick up passengers.
Beyond the issues with moving the bus in a rational way, navigating the streets themselves is its own challenge. While the bus comes equipped with turn signals and a windshield, it does not come equipped with any way to look out either its side windows or up. Before each turn, I would honk my horn on a loop and yeet myself into traffic, hoping there were no cars, as it was impossible to turn my head to check. The few times there was a car, I got t-boned and dragged an entire city block before being shaken from the maw of what I can only assume was a tank merrily barreling its way down the streets of “New York.”
Similarly, there is no way to turn the driver’s head to be able to see stoplights. I solved this by parking half a block from any red light, then gunning the engine as soon as it turned green to try and make the light before it turned back to red. Sometimes I made it. Sometimes I didn’t. I learned that prayer is the true bus driver experience.
While the game does offer a way for the driver to see the status of the stoplight when they are stopped underneath it, this is nestled in the bus’ upgrades, and is not available for the first few routes the player drives. Even with this upgrade, the light would still sometimes clock me as running a red light when I was not.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3342897286
But even beyond all these issues with the lights and blindswaths, there is still the issue of actually getting to the bus stops. The game does not provide a player with a map of an overall route, instead supplying them with a minimap that points to the next stop on the route. Here again, the game takes the relatively simple concept of creating a path from A to B and creates a navigation system so bad, it would make Apple Maps blush.
Despite all that, despite every hurdle and headache, it is possible to make it to a bus stop, to stop outside the little bus shelter, and swing open the bus doors.
And about a third of the time, the game will refuse to acknowledge the bus has arrived, and the route has to be restarted.
That is the true City Bus Simulator 2024 experience.
If aliens landed on Earth and were told about the concept of driving sims, then instructed to make one based on description alone, I am convinced City Bus Simulator 2024 is what they’d come up with. It has the barest trappings of its genre, the faintest understanding of what it’s supposed to be, that is then so tattered and shredded by the failings of its own design as to be utterly unrecognisable as anything but a hellish mess. What joy there is in playing it is ironic, as I slam my handbrakes after rocketing into a bus stop, praying to these alien gods that the figures waiting there might finally recognise me as a bus.
In my heart, though, I know they never will, and I am forever trapped in my loop, bleating out with my sad horn, knowing there is no escape from their stares.
[i]Developer: OTTO Games
Genre: Job sim, driving sim
Year: 2024
Country: Turkey
Language: English
Play time: Hey, I’m a big bus now, I’m going away, ciao, mama, ciao[/i]
[quote] This game was reviewed with a key provided by the developer for free through Curator Connect. [/quote]
[quote] Follow the Summit Curator page, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41449676/]Summit Reviews[/url], to see more high-quality reviews like this one. [/quote]
