Is This Your Next Commute Obsession?
Buses. Love them or loathe them, they have been the cornerstone of public transport for an age.
In fact, the first buses in the UK were found in Leeds and Bradford from about 1911, moving things forward in the form of trolleybuses.
Nowadays, they are sometimes packed, and they are sometimes dangerous; especially true for anyone who has got a night bus. But they are cheap and now clean to the environment.
So how do you control a network of them? Well, that’s what City Bus Manager is all about…
Home Town Hubs
At the start of City Bus Manager you can choose whether you wish to dive in to the sandbox mode, getting right in there without any time limits or quests, or to slowly work things out with the scenarios section; something that should be seen as a bit of a campaign. Most importantly, the latter gives you a little tutorial and I’d highly advise you not to skimp on that, as it is needed to get to grips with the game.
The first thing you do though is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a game, whereby to get the location of your bus HQ you just put in your postcode. The game then uses live maps to put your headquarters on one of the roads near you, so you can create a bus empire in your local area if you want to, or anywhere around Europe.
Depot Details and Driving Duties
From there, you’ll want to create the perfect depot. Here you put in a reception room, a kitchen, and some toilets for example, and then inside these rooms you need a door and the likes; maybe some furniture, some fridges and vending machines for your upcoming staff.
This works like a normal house-building sim game where you can call up a menu and pick and choose from a variety of different things to purchase.
You are then ready to buy some buses, starting off with some second-hand ones. As the money starts to roll in, you can keep repairing them or go all-out and buy some brand-spanking new ones. You hire staff as well, trying to keep them happy, but what I most like about City Bus Manager is the opportunity to go creating routes around my home location using real-world maps and putting a nice bus stop just outside my front door. When all of this is done it’s just a matter of waiting, keeping tabs on everything like in any good management game.
Control Scheme and Visuals
The port of City Bus Manager from PC (and mouse) to console and the controller works very well, and it’s easy to navigate the UI, mostly without any major headaches. However, like all games of this ilk, you will either be turned on by the sheer amount of micro-management your bus depot needs, or pushed away from it within mere minutes. This is a game in which you’ll want to go deep, diving into all the intricacies of the systems at hand, getting that depot looking exactly how you want it to.
City Bus Manager is fine visually too, with the UI all reasonably orderly and easy to understand. That said, there are elements which feel a bit small. Further, the live map integration is a nice bit of trickery, and the colours and visual look of the actual depot and characters are fine if a bit bland. City Bus Manager most certainly has a Wii feel to the graphics. That’s possibly not a bad thing, and can work well in the context of the game.
A Niche Management Sim with Local Charm
If you’re a sim fan, there is a lot to love about City Bus Manager. The ability to make this as local as you like is a great feature, and the way it works with the bus routes is genius. The challenges are good too, but I would have liked to see more, to help aid longevity. All the other sim management stuff that you would expect from such a game, like route planning, buying assets and hiring staff is good too, yet never groundbreaking.
But just remember, if you really want to, in City Bus Manager you can stick a bus stop right outside your house. That may well be enough to sell it.
Important Links
Build Your Bus Empire – City Bus Manager Arrives on Xbox and PlayStation – https://www.thexboxhub.com/build-your-bus-empire-city-bus-manager-arrives-on-xbox-and-playstation/
Buy City Bus Manager on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/city-bus-manager/9pf5tpm8ff9h
