Hit the road with tons of company
In Bus Simulator PRO 2017, a mobile game by Mageeks, you take the role of an inexperienced bus driver just starting their career. You’ll navigate both streets and laws across five different cities and in up to eight different buses. Both other vehicles and pedestrians roam the streets, in ways you’d expect, and you’ll find them all over the 50 different loops you can run. The world is your oyster… or at least some of the streets are!
A quick sale
As a simulation game, Bus Simulator PRO 2017 is about the details of driving a bus around. You won’t simply pull up next to pedestrians: you’ll take their tickets, too, and decide whether to wait or not for pedestrians who’re running up to catch a bus they weren’t there for. Other functions of the bus, like the wheelchair ramp, are yours to control from its cockpit (which differs from bus to bus, incidentally). There’s a progression system in the game, too, basic though it is. You earn experience, which allows you to unlock new cities and buses… assuming you also have the cash to handle moving or financing your own, upper-crust model rather than the one you’re given. But that’s part of the dream, so get to it!
On a bus, crashes are rare
Playability is important for any game. Although we encountered no problems just driving around the streets and highways of New York, some users did, so we tested the game on multiple devices to see whether there are problems with it. Though we experienced one crash late in all of our testing, the game is overall very stable, and any problems will likely be quickly fixed by the developers. This is particularly pleasing considering how graphically demanding the game must be. Though some older phones, such as the Nexus S, may struggle with the game, most run it quite well. The game uses a semi-realistic, colorful CG style that should be familiar to anyone who’s watched a modern cartoon or a video about a futuristic patent. The models for people are very rounded and stylistic; the buses are more detailed, and the environments are somewhere in between. Overall, it all manages to work quite well together. The graphics particularly excel in terms of weather. Rain creates fog, clouds darken the lighting, and so forth. The weather is appropriate to each map, too: you see heavier precipitation in New York than you do in the cities that are farther from the coast. Overall, the map design works well with the graphics to create an enjoyable, immersive bus driving experience.
Professional quality
And it’s on that note that we can leave (or start) Bus Simulator PRO 2017. The game focuses on quality over quantity, and though you’ll only have a few buses and maps compared to other, gigantic simulators that you might play on a desktop computer, PRO 2017 is an impressive game considering the platform it runs on. If you’re looking for a lively yet immersive simulation with realistic rules and elements, give Bus Simulator PRO 2017 a shot.
