Bus Driver [Indiescene]

All racing games are, ultimately, the same. Drive a route quickly. There are no surprises and very little originality, and then there’s Bus Driver, 

More akin to a flight simulator than a racing game, Bus Driver sees you driving a bus across a nicely detailed city, picking up and dropping off passengers.  When I first began playing it I cried aloud: “It’s Crazy Taxi on a bus!”  That comparison is only partly apt.  You do indeed pick up and drop off fares, but the similarities end there.  The game is divided into “missions” where you run a certain route in predetermined weather conditions (you don’t know stress until you’ve driven a bus in heavy snow.)  Bus Driver doesn’t have the spontaneity and mayhem of Crazy Taxi. It does, however, have game-play elements that you won’t find elsewhere.

First, you are driving a bus, and it feels right.  It handles like a bus.  It’s a slow, lumbering pig.  It has a huge amount of momentum, and takes a long time to get up to speed, to stop, and has a huge turning radius.  If nothing else, the game may increase your sympathy for city bus drivers.  Second, the game is a bit like an egg race.  By this I mean that if you stomp on the brakes too quickly, your passengers will become upset, and you’ll lose points.  Stomping on the brakes when no one is in the bus results in no penalty, but those situations are few and far between.

You also gain (or lose) points for obeying (or breaking) traffic laws.  Use a turn signal before changing lanes, get 10 points; randomly change lanes without signaling, lose 100.  Similar rules apply for stopping at (or running) red lights.  Collisions result in a hefty penalty.  

You drive through a fictional European city with varied environments as well as varied weather conditions.  Traffic is a constant hazard, and the clock will constantly tick away the seconds, reminding you of your inadequacies as a driver.  The controls are keyboard-based. I eventually settled on using my left hand to steer and my right hand to control the turn signals, flashers, and doors.  One annoyance is that there’s no mouse control even on the menu screens.

There are a few missed opportunities here.  It seems to me that one of the most interesting aspects of being a bus driver isn’t just the driving, but interacting with the passengers.  It would have been amusing for the customers to have a little more color — “Uh oh, here’s that group of drunk Danish football fans again.”  But this is a nitpick.  The game makes no excuses for being purely about driving, so I can’t be too upset about that. The lack of a tutorial gave me about 1 minute of angst when I first started playing, which is 1 minute too much.

Bus Driver is a charming game, strangely paced, almost languid, but I enjoyed its attention to detail and approachable controls. It’s rare that a driving game is able to surprise me in any way, and Bus Driver surprised me in several.  If you enjoy simulators, you should give it a look.  A demo is available at the publisher’s web site.

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