Bus Simulator 21 Critic Reviews

Bus Simulator 21 is for everyone. Being able to cater to your playstyle from the most basic of set ups to as realistic as they can make it, the game gets its hooks in you after a few hours. I always wanted to run one more route before getting up from a play session. The vehicle AI leaves something to be desired, but we can all think of a few drivers that give us road rage.

Bus Simulator 21 certainly kicks things into high gear above its predecessor with a lot of appreciated quality-of-life improvements. But, it's brought down by an awkward driving system, UI clutter, AI clunkiness, and apparent optimization issues. Yet, it remains a solid new product in the active driving sim genre.

Consistent improvement of the series, in which you can sink dozens of hours with the right mindset.

Stressful yet relaxing, realistic yet laughably stiff at times – Bus Simulator 21 is full of contradictions some will appreciate and others won’t understand. It succeeds in giving you a faithful recreation of what it’s like to drive around a bus all day and all the ups and downs that come with the job. It also keeps things as safe as possible causing it to be as mundane as, well, driving a bus all day.

Ultimately, Bus Simulator 21 does a good job - it gets the blend of driving simulator and management simulator pretty much spot on, even if both of those individual parts have room for improvement.

Bus Simulator 21 turned out to be a lot better than I was anticipating. It has a ton of the typical shortcomings you see in simulator-type games, but it also gets a lot right. The maps are large, pretty, and varied. Busses handle well and feel weighty when making corners. And the multiplayer is genuinely fantastic. If other sims take note of what Bus Simulator 21 is doing in regards to cooperative modes, this might be a genre I start to pay much more mind to.