Bus Simulator 27 takes you to the fictional city of Felicia Bay, inspired by the sunny landscapes of the Iberian Peninsula. The region is divided into 20 districts, each with its own distinct environment. You begin by creating an avatar and choosing a name and logo for your bus company. From there, you’re responsible for just about everything, from transporting passengers and selling tickets to purchasing buses, planning routes, and hiring employees.

The game offers three modes: Story, Career, and Sandbox. Unfortunately, none lets you focus exclusively on driving. You’re always expected to manage your company, which means spending a considerable amount of time navigating menus before you can finally get behind the wheel. Skip or fail to complete the tutorial, and it can also be surprisingly easy to lose your way.

Unfortunately, you have to spend quite a bit of time in the menu. I’d rather not.

One of Bus Simulator 27′s biggest strengths is the sheer number of licensed buses available. The game features more than 45 vehicles from 13 world-famous manufacturers, including Solaris, Mercedes-Benz, Scania, and Volvo. For the first time in the series, you can also get behind the wheel of coaches. All in all, this gives the title the largest fleet in the history of the franchise – and that’s definitely worth appreciating.

The devs promised support for steering wheels. I was quietly hoping that, unlike in Bus Bound, plugging in my wheel would allow the game to automatically detect the setup and choose the best configuration, saving me from having to fiddle with everything myself. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. I had to manually map pretty much every control, including the most basic ones, such as the accelerator and brake pedals.

Peak enthusiasm.

After a dozen minutes, I finally got it working, and thankfully, the wheel performed quite well. In the end, I played partly with the wheel and partly with the keyboard. The game has an absurd number of functions, some of which correspond to the driver’s navigation-related actions before they even get behind the wheel, so there was no realistic way to fit everything onto my controller anyway – I would have run out of buttons.

Driving enormous machines around town and ferrying passengers from one stop to another can be quite enjoyable – provided nothing goes spectacularly wrong on the technical side. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done. When I reviewed Bus Bound, I thought the game was technically undercooked. With Bus Simulator 27, however, things seem to have gotten even worse.

The most satisfying moment in the game.

At present, the title appears to have some serious problems with driver AI. One vehicle will stop somewhere and block the road, while another will drive somewhere it clearly shouldn’t. Perhaps that’s simply realism – a reflection of the everyday chaos of working in traffic management. Nevertheless, this makes gameplay quite frustrating. The stiff vehicle animations certainly don’t help, either.

Pedestrians aren’t much better: they look and move like hordes of robots, all equipped with the same outdated animations. I also experienced some graphical glitches, including textures clipping through one another. My personal favorite is when the camera suddenly jumps literally inside the driver’s body as he boards a bus. You can see part of an arm or a jacket floating by an otherwise empty character. And that’s what one calls literally stepping into someone else’s shoes.

Cute sweater, bro.

Bus Simulator 27 features a system that penalises you for imperfect driving, such as failing to slow down when required or using the wrong turn signal. Unfortunately, this system doesn’t always work as intended either, and you can receive penalties for things that aren’t really your fault (including collisions caused by the brain-dead AI). If I remember correctly, Bus Bound doesn’t have such an unreliable penalty mechanic.

Despite the UE5-related glitches and lackluster animations, the game actually looks quite good. There are two visual styles to choose from: a more “realistic” option and a more stylised one. Both look appealing. The buses, in particular, have received plenty of attention, while the surrounding environments are perfectly decent as well. Sunlight reflecting off the roofs of the vehicles appears especially picturesque. The developers have also put considerable effort into the engine sounds, with each bus having its own distinct audio character.

Simply replacing the wheel won’t help here; the other road users need to be changed as well.

Bus Simulator 27 is available now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Reviewed on PC.

A copy of Bus Simulator 27 was provided by the publisher.