Bus sim bargain

Isla, THC’s accountant, can’t grumble about my game expenditure this week. Assuming I don’t purchase anything tomorrow, I’ll have spent a piffling £1.79 on interactive entertainment over the past seven days. Although I already own Bus Driver Simulator – one of the few bus sims that can hold a candle to the venerable OMSI – buying the on-sale GOG version was a no-brainer as it comes with four vehicular add-ons no longer available through Steam.

90% off at present at GOG.com, the ‘premium’ version of KishMish’s first bus sim includes two atmospheric maps (one Russian, one German) and ten different people movers, the most antiquated of which are as achingly Eastern Bloc as plinthed T-34s and roadside kvass bowsers.

The Russian environment alone is an excellent reason to buy. In 2018 I said this about it:

“KishMish’s unexpectedly faithful depiction of a section of a real city 100 kilometres south of Moscow is one of the main reasons Bus Driver Simulator now occupies the coveted Number 2 spot in my personal bus sim top ten. Although the modelled area isn’t vast (the longest of the the routes is circular and takes about 30 minutes to complete) there is variety. Incorporated are chunks of relatively modern city centre with multi-lane highways and junctions, older districts with pre-war pastel-coloured abodes, and a run out into the suburbs along the kind of tree-lined unlit road found throughout Eastern Europe.

A plethora of unique, attractively textured buildings, some in need of a lick of a paint and a scrape of stucco, belie the game’s budget price tag and provide a sense of place rare in the increasingly crowded bus sim genre. Beetling along Serpukhov’s boulevards, especially at night, it’s easy to drift into one of those reality-smudging reveries that OMSI and the SCS truck sims conjure so effortlessly.”