Is your bus running late? Well, it’s probably being controlled by this game…
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/59926/bus-driver-simulator-countryside-switch-review
In all honesty, I’m unsure what I was expecting from Bus Driver Simulator Countryside. I mean, of course, I was expecting a simulator game in which you play as a bus driver, and I thought it was going to be… fun? It was not. And that isn’t because being a bus driver isn’t fun, because I imagine it can be. When the game just feels broken, it kind of saps any fun or playability from the game.
Bus Driver Simulator Countryside is set in Murom, one of the oldest towns in Russia. Through your varied bus routes, you’ll travel around Murom as well as a bunch of villages surrounding the town. This information doesn’t add any value to the game, as there is no narrative, story or dialogue that adds any more depth than, “You are a bus driver. Do your job.”
There are three modes in Bus Driver Simulator Countryside: tutorial, career, and scenarios. I cannot stress this enough, do the tutorial! There is no way you will be able to just figure out how to play this without it, and even still, the controls are a bit of a mess. To begin with, you need to press Y to open the dashboard menu and then navigate that menu with L and R to either start the engine, turn the windscreen wipers, or turn the radio on. Once you have turned the engine on or whatever action you take, you need to press B to close that menu. The X button opens your lights menu. This allows you to turn on your headlights, cabin lights, and hazard lights. Again, once you’ve turned whatever you need on, select B to close this menu (there's a reason why I'm diving into the minutiae). The B button also puts your parking brake on or off. Many times, the game was either unresponsive or lagged in these menus, where I would press B more than once as the first press hadn’t registered. The game then caught up with my button presses and would aggressively remove and use the parking brake until it had finally caught up.
Don’t get me started on the actual driving. I have never driven a bus, but it only felt and looked like you were controlling Bambi on ice. I was just skidding side to side, trying to manoeuvre the eerily quiet streets of Murom. Also, can somebody confirm how tall the curbs are in Murom? Because during the tutorial (yes, the tutorial), I skidded up onto the curb - only a little bit - and the bus awkwardly balanced on the curb so that neither the front nor back wheels would move. My only option was to quit the game and begin again. This happened to me four too many times (possibly more) in all three modes.
The career mode of Bus Driver Simulator Countryside is precisely what it says on the box. You begin your career as a bus driver. It opens Need for Speed style, where you have a pot of cash and can purchase your starter vehicle, which is wholly pointless as you start with 5000₽ and the cheapest bus you can afford is 5000₽. From here, you select from one of a handful of routes, start times and whether you want the winter option on, and then you start your day of work. The funds you earn from your bus driving can go towards new buses and upgrades like curtains for your existing bus.
When your routes are long, straight roads such as the Drachevo route, you can see the charm that some will enjoy; however, the only enjoyment I got was from not needing to turn, which shows there is a real problem.
You then have the scenarios mode, which will throw you in unique situations a bus driver might find themselves in, such as having to strip all the seats outside of your bus and deliver potatoes instead - earning points by succeeding in the task as well as smaller objectives like reaching certain stops on time, as you lose points for being late, and you also lose points for being too early.
Graphically, Bus Driver Simulator Countryside is as basic and simple as it gets. It looks like an old PC game, but I guess you don’t need stellar HD graphics for games as straightforward as this. Sections of the town in the background will pop in, such as trees, buildings and upcoming bus stops, which if it weren’t for the minimap helping out, I’d have blitzed straight past. In all honesty, the most aesthetically pleasing thing about this game is the dancing, ‘body-popping’ bus driver character you see in the background of the game’s main menu.
Bus Driver Simulator Countryside is, put simply, not good. If you can nail the long-winded button scheme and control the bus any better than I can, you might get something out of it. But even still, there's still not much. It’s slow-paced, laggy, and the environment just isn’t friendly to you. The curbs will just stop you in your tracks, and the other vehicles will just keep going as if you don’t exist. Everything is against you in Bus Driver Simulator Countryside, and in turn, I am against Bus Driver Simulator Countryside.
Topic: Bus Driver Simulator Countryside (Switch) Review (Read 1891 times)
