Bus Simulator 27: the finest fleet in the series, and traffic that rear-ends you at every stop

You pull up at a bus stop. You open the doors. And the car behind you goes into your rear bumper.

That is not an isolated accident, it is the single most reported behaviour since advance access opened, and on its own it sums up the state of this game: underneath a technical layer that is not ready, there is a very good bus simulator.

So let us sort it out.

What is genuinely excellent

The fleet first, and it crushes the previous entries. Over 45 officially licensed buses from thirteen manufacturers, including Solaris, Mercedes-Benz, MAN, IVECO BUS, Scania and Volvo. Rigid, articulated, double-decker, and the whole electric range.

And above all, the coaches. This is the first time in the series that you take the wheel of a touring coach, and it changes the nature of the game. An urban run is a string of stops. An intercity run is a road, a rhythm, a completely different kind of driving. Several players say this is where the game is at its best, and I agree.

The region holds up. Felicia Bay is a fictional southern European coast inspired by Spain and Portugal, with twin cities, Alcaztelar and Mequina, and twenty distinct districts. Dynamic weather, a day-night cycle, busy streets, all in Unreal Engine 5. When it runs, it looks good, and late afternoon light on a palm-lined boulevard is worth the detour.

The management is richer than you would think. You create routes, set timetables, hire drivers, assign them services, and dress your buses in liveries and advertising. Three modes coexist, Story, Career and Sandbox, and route planning is cited even in negative reviews as the part that keeps people going.

And there is variety around the wheel. You can play as an inspector, board a bus as an ordinary passenger, or get out and explore Felicia Bay on foot looking for points of interest and hidden collectibles. Co-op runs to four players with crossplay, and mods go through mod.io.

What is wrong, and we should be precise

The game launches officially today, but it has been playable since 3 September for buyers of the Year 1 edition. As a result there are already 203 reviews, 124 of them positive, placing it at a mixed rating.

The complaints are remarkably consistent from one language to another.

Computer-controlled traffic is problem number one. Vehicles drive into you at stops, other buses included, crash into each other and cut you off. Worse, the penalty system sometimes punishes you for an accident inflicted on you. One player describes being knocked onto the pavement by a car as his first mission started, then being penalised for it.

Crashes are frequent. Unreal error reports, hard exits, video memory saturation, and several players point specifically at DLSS as a trigger. One player with twenty-one hours logged writes that the description should mention this is a beta.

Performance regressed compared with pre-release builds. That is a recurring complaint, with very sharp localised drops in certain areas.

The steering wheel has an irritating bug: pressing any button on the wheel cuts the throttle. For a game that advertises its support for driving peripherals, that is a serious fault.

Multiplayer suffers from desync and several story missions refuse to validate a route you actually completed.

The other side of the scales

Let us be fair, because the picture is not uniform.

Players with dozens of hours keep coming back. One describes 27 to 32 frames per second on a GTX 1650 laptop at low settings, with a good opinion of TSR upscaling. Another, with a hundred and twenty hours on the previous entry, refunded then re-bought the game on seeing the studio still shipping fixes.

And that is the important point: Simteract has been publishing frequent updates since advance access, and several players note progress between patches. This is not a studio that vanished after cashing in.

Should you buy it today

My position is simple and I will own it.

If you are a regular of the series, if you accept playing a game being repaired live, and if what you mostly want is to drive coaches along a pretty Mediterranean coast, there is plenty to do right now for 29.99 euros.

If you want a clean simulator, wait a month. Nothing is urgent, the region is not going anywhere, and the studio's record suggests most of the complaints above will be fixed.

What is certain is that the material is there. The fleet is superb, the map is a success, the coaches are a genuine addition to the series, and route planning is more interesting than it has ever been. What is missing is not content, it is finish.

We have written a full guide to getting started, with the settings to change first and the steering wheel traps.

How long did you last before your first bump at a stop? We compare crumpled panels on the InsertCoins Discord.