Really fun demo. Do yourself a favour and ignore Hond’s review. I have no idea what they’re talking about or why they’re so filled with hate.
I’ll go negatives first - It definitely needs optimising, but I was getting a pretty smooth 55 fps on my 4060 RTX on medium settings with DLSS set to “Balanced” on my Ultrawide at 2560 x 1080. Also, why is it having to precompile shaders every time I launch it? I found at least one hilarious bug where a mountain bike would suddenly appear glued to the front of the bus sideways when I pulled into a bus stop. And that’s it… pretty much.
The rest of the game is really fun. I’ve been looking for a decent Bus driving game (not so much sim) for AGES. Also, going into this I had no love for Sabre Interactive. They absolutely ruined Dakar Desert Rally. What a horrible mess that game turned out to be! I have to admit though… they’ve redeemed themselves a little with this demo. At least I think so.
So, the good things that come to mind are…
It worked immediately with my T-248 wheel. No messing about with confusing settings like in THE BUS. It just worked and it was really easy to adjust all the settings.
I love how you have fixed side mirrors but you get a temporary mirror that appears only when you indicate and only on the side you indicate. It works really well and doesn’t clutter up the UI when it’s not needed. ETS2, for example does offer UI mirrors but they’re either on or off and not cleverly tied to the indicator like in this game.
The people in the town look good and walk around naturally. At least a LOT more naturally than the pedestrians in BUS SIMULATOR 21. There’s also a decent amount of people and a nice variety of cars as well.
I love the town itself. It feels like a city that’s buzzing with activity and looks really nice. The lighting is great and the sunshine and rain effects feel perfect to me. Compared to the weird plastic town feel of BUS SIMULATOR 21 this is a breath of fresh air. I wanted to love BS21 so much but I just couldn’t play it because the environment was so jarringly fake feeling.
I also really liked the game loop. How you unlock extras routes and buses by getting “likes” from your passengers for each bus stop by following all the good driving rules. It made me want to keep driving the routes till I’d filled up each bus stop’s “Like” meter and got that all important star. I also really like not having to fiddle about with change and tickets for passengers because bus travel is free in this game. I really didn’t enjoy BS21 where you have to get up and go check each passenger for tickets and figure out if anyone’s trying to ride the bus for free. I just wanna drive man!
I’m really excited to see how they improve this game and for an early access demo this seriously impressed me. It feels like there might FINALLY be a good bus game on the horizon 😁
Why can’t RPS write a normal headline for once
Convoluted headlines is their trademark and I love it.
I wish they DID trademark it so half the gaming news websites didn’t follow suit
It feels very…corporate. Forced casual
For what it’s worth, this has always been their style (I started reading them in 2010), even before the Eurogamer acquisition in 2017 or so.
I agree that it does feel more forced now, they a bit more subtle and tasteful back in the day.
Yeah, I didn’t have any issues with them until recently when every other outlet started copying it and they seemingly cranked it to 11 in response. They’d work great as taglines but I prefer descriptive titles so I don’t have to “figure out” the topic. Feels antithetical to the purpose of a headline
I hate it. It’s always stupidly cringe, overly wordy, and just makes me feel dumber for having read it.
Tried the demo. Its 42gb to download, lmao. Its UE5. It runs like ass. Like my 5800X3D and 6900XT combo isnt the very best anymore. But it can handle every big AAA game with gorgoues graphics just fine. But Bus Bound seems to be the limit. Better upgrade to a 5090, i guess. Seriously i barely hit 60 fps on medium(without lumen for GI and reflections) and balanced(!) upscaling. The artstyle of the game doesnt even shine on ‘epic’. But on medium it looks like a 10-15 year old budget title and still runs like ass. Also TSR/FSR/DLSS/XESS is a must. If you atleast want a clean image with low graphics: though luck. Temporal artifacting and smearing are on the table. Now eat shit.
The intro of the game is super low budget which isnt an issue but isnt a plus either. Driving physics are so barebones that i feel like its a barely touched UE5 premade physics asset. Collisions are laughably bad and worse then a lot of the PS1 racing games i played a few months back(this isnt an exaggeration). One time the busses(eseses?) collision box got stuck in the asphalt of a (slight) downward slope and the physics exploded. Amateur hour. Didnt make it to the managment aspect because i stopped caring.
Now to the positives: The game made me finally read into getting Optiscaler running on Linux to spoof FSR4 on my RDNA2 card. Its pretty solid for an upscaler. I will try it now with Control where the image quality always bothered me in the past.
Anyway: Fuck RPS and Saber Interactive for their misleading little adverticle.
