Busway Islands – Puzzle : PS4 Review

Busway Islands – Puzzle from Brazilian developer Rising Moon Games, AKA Moraes Game Studio, via publisher QUByte Interactive is a bit of a throwback to review games of yore for us here at PSC. Unusually, it’s PS4 only, we could well have seen this working on our beloved Vita as a cross-buy title. It’s the second game we’ve seen from this dev in recent months, with Richie having reviewed Match Village in April.

The back of the napkin summary is simply that Busway Islands is a puzzle game where you have to plot routes for buses around islands, taking in the required stops as you do so before reaching an exit. There’s a bit more to it than that, but not a great deal more.

The text on PSN would suggest the scope is rather more than it is, with it reading “Busway Islands is a puzzle game about organizing roads and rails across a large archipelago. Your goal is to create a safe and efficient route between bus stations, ensuring that all passengers are picked up along the way.” The archipelago aspect would suggest that all the levels are joined together, but in fact the levels are entirely separate from one another.

You see, the throwback aspect is very much down to the fact that there’s just thirty-five levels on offer here. And in the grand fashion of our old pals at Ratalaika, there’s precious little thought given to the trophies. You finish a level, you get a trophy. Once you’ve beaten all thirty-five levels, you get a platinum trophy.

At least the challenge increases somewhat as you progress through the game, though more due to introduction of new elements such as extra buses, trains and more complex junction types. Though in the case of the trains, you’ll find yourself planning the rail route first as the track layout will be obvious enough. Then you’ll overlay the route for the buses.

It’s best to think of Busway Islands as a planner that you eventually let the traffic loose on, even if they only have the one route on the way to the exit. There’s literally only one solution to any level with no deviation from the plan. It very much gives you the impression that the devs have created the levels, then simply scrambled the tiles. We’d even go as far as saying that we found Busway Islands a bit boring on occasion, especially when you’re faced with the bigger levels.

Cleverly designed puzzles are far more important in a game such as this, rather than simply making the puzzles bigger. Yes, you have the different junction signs that come into the equation, but Busway Islands is generally a bit samey throughout. We never came away feeling like we’d cracked a particularly tough puzzle, more that we had overcome the level by attrition alone.

Increasingly in the latter levels, our approach was lay railway track, then systematically lay the roads to fit around. You’ll invariably have more than one bus stop to service, but only one station. The main consideration after that is where you place your level crossing signs to stop collisions. Not that they’re a huge issue, as after the daft little explosion animation, the level reverts to where it was before you started the traffic.

We went for a fair time playing Busway Islands thinking that the game camera had a fixed perspective that you could pan and zoom in on. Though it turns out you could rotate the camera, not that we have any instructions on how to do so. Nor could we repeat it. It’s a bit like when we finished Final Fantasy VI on the SNES without running as we simply didn’t realise we could. We muddled through at any rate. You can do that with Busway Islands too.

Post review edit: The developers have patched this with a handy tooltip to show it is in fact to rotate the camera. Nice one.

One thing that Busway Islands does well is letting you save your progress halfway through an attempt. This at least makes the bigger, and dare we say tedious, levels less onerous than they might otherwise be. This also lets you get out of any moebius routes that you might inadvertently set up.

In conclusion, Busway Islands – Puzzle is more of a light confection than a fully fleshed out concept, this is reflected in the price of a mere £3.99 which is about the same as a four pack of Islands cider in Aldi. That’s their knockoff of Inch’s cider, the name being a coincidence with regards this game. Busway Islands is OK, but you’re probably looking at forty-five minutes to an hour total gameplay for your money, due to the paucity of levels.