Bus World – PS5 Review

From Polish-based publisher Ultimate Games comes the console port of a three-year-old PC game, Bus World. Originally produced by Russian developer Kishmish Games, this port was likely produced by Ultimate Games as going by the Steam page for the game, it seems to have been pretty much abandoned by the dev.

What will immediately strike you is how spartan the menus are. You’ve got three options: play, options and credits. The options allow you to tweak settings such as controls and various graphical settings. Curiously, mirrors are disabled by default with the disclaimer ‘this option may affect performance.’

Upon starting the game proper, you have the option to play preset scenarios or freeplay mode. The latter option is pretty hamstrung to start with, with vehicles and modifiers locked behind the scenarios in three locations, being Iceland, Soviet-era Ukraine and modern day China.

There’s only three missions in Iceland, the first of which has you negotiating several geysers in your minibus. It’s a reasonable introduction to the mechanics of the game. Every interaction starts with you holding to turn on the ignition and tapping to release the handbrake. Drive to the marked rectangle that doubles up as a bus stop and you’ll pick up your passengers, opening your doors with . Just don’t forget to close them before you pull away or you’ll cop a penalty for doing so.

Arbitrarily, the fare for a passenger is $32 regardless of whether you’re in Iceland, the USSR or China. A bit weird, but eh. The second Iceland scenario proved to be our eye opener as to how churlish Bus World can be. You’re meant to outrun a lava flow but your vehicle isn’t up to it. The fact that you’re operating at night highlights that your headlights are so dim as to be useless. So you’ll be driving and not able to see a damn thing. Before you know it your only path has been cut off and you’ll have failed the scenario.

This is the least of Bus World’s problems it turns out. We love us a lemon here at PSC and for a while we were able to let the issues slide. Once we got cracking on the Chernobyl scenarios around Pripyat we sorta got into it. Set before and after the events of April 1986 at ChNPP, the map is accurately modelled on the actual location.

Even down to the fact that we got a bit lost one mission and were able to check Google Maps to help us on our way. That was partly down to our having broken the scripting on the one mission and not having got the prompts as to our next step. The problem is that you have no idea what the passing grade on a mission is until you’ve completed it at least once.

This is all well and good for the most part, but later scenarios prove all the more challenging. Particularly one with a tourist bus on the Chinese coast where you’re supposed to take a bunch of tourists from the coast up into the hills. Approaching a rickety bridge one way is pretty doable, but the opposite direction proves impossible.

You see, the bus you’re given is far too large for the task and you’ll find yourself struggling with the camera angle to stay on track across the bridge. We’ve probably tried this same scenario a good twenty times over, failing each time. There is an option to get unstuck, but it’ll cost you $50 a pop. You can go in the opposite direction over the bridge and we’ve been able to get that way without much bother, but upon trying to negotiate a dirt road that you’ve literally no choice to use, you get stuck and can’t get past.

It’s made by the fact you’re in a proper coach that’s clearly too big for the road, a minibus being more than sufficient, especially when your passengers would easily fit inside with room to spare. But no, you’re stuck with a vehicle that’s not fit for purpose.

The most annoying thing is that it will already have taken you fifteen minutes to get to this point, which has contributed in no small part to our thirteen hours played so far. Any goodwill we’d accumulated by this point ebbed away, a bit like the Danny Boyle/Alex Garland 28 film series. Have you seen the last one? It’s a film is all we can say.

The graphics are very PS3 in terms of fidelity, though framerates are OK. Your PS5 isn’t exactly being taxed by this, which makes the mirrors issue all the more baffling. Framerates in the wing mirrors drop to single figures for some reason, so the reason for them being disabled by default starts to make sense. Immersion is ruined somewhat by the mirrors being blank unreflective slabs, so we chose to have them turned on.

We did notice each mirror is individually rendered with the view in each being effectively identical in each. Mirrors don’t work that way the last we checked when we looked in our actual car wing mirror. We still remain baffled by the crap frame rates in Bus World’s mirrors anyway.

In conclusion, Bus World is a janky lemon that we sorta like despite the issues that bedevil it. The hoops you have to jump through to get the best ratings on the scenarios are generally absurd and when you do get through unscathed, it’s more through luck than judgement. The Chernobyl scenarios are genuinely interesting though the made-up Chinese location is less so. The landscapes are a mess in the latter which makes for tedium if we’re honest, especially when you clip a sign on a blind corner and cop a $150 fine for your trouble.

Buy it if it’s on offer, but steer clear if you’re not into slow going driving games. Think Mud Runner but with buses we guess. Only far less miserable.