This game has an interesting combination of micro- and macro-management. The macro side is the service planning: building routes and balancing service frequency with demand on a real-world map. I haven't tried a larger city yet, but the ~50,000 population town I started with has reasonably realistic ridership numbers and commuting patterns. It's fun to play virtual service planner in a location you know in real life!

The micro side consists of the depot management. You assign drivers and vehicles to shifts (manually at first, and later automatically) while balancing fleet, facility, and staffing needs against the service you've planned. This bit, in combination with the service planning, is where the magic happens. Want to increase frequency on a popular line to meet demand? You'll need new vehicles and staff, which come with a cascading set of requirements. You'll need more parking- oh, and now your fueling station is too busy so you'll need another, and now you need more mechanics, who need more office space... and so on. There's a lot of small goals to keep you engaged.

I'll also note the devs came up with a clever system regarding revenue- in real life, bus fares almost never cover the full cost of operations (the exact amount of "fare recovery" can vary, but in the US we're talking typical figures of 20% or less per operating hour). The remaining cost is typically subsidized by taxes. Most transit management games tend to ignore this nuance, but City Bus Manager has a clever solution- the city pays you extra money for each fare you collect. That keeps the tycoon-style gameplay intact while keeping things more realistic. Does this matter in practical terms? Well not really... but I thought it was a nice touch.

I didn't realize until writing this review that the devs also made the Busbetrieb (Bus Company) Simulator OMSI 2 add-on. That explains why this game feels more robust than a typical first effort.

If you like transit tycoon games and don't mind some micro, City Bus Manager's worth a look.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☑ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☑ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☑ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☑ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☑ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

Maybe it's because I just happen to be a retired London Transport bus driver that I found this game so fascinating and a joy to play. Yes, this 84-year-old relived his time driving some of my old bus routes. Yes, you can choose the place you start—it could even be on the street where you live.
It has many features and DLC content to keep your mind engaged. It even has mods which are also useful especially if your bus routes are in the UK. You can design your color scheme for your buses and also the logo I am absolutely hooked and want to give this game a Grumbyolman gold star. a definite 10/10
You may laugh but I have to be dragged away from this game. It"s just so absorbing. It should carry a warning.

Decent game, but don't expect much longevity from the game as there are little objectives to beyond buying buses -> earn money -> expand by creating more routes and buying more buses. That's it. If creating and perfecting your own bus network is your thing then this is a good game I guess.

This is a mixed review, not a wholly negative one.

The game's trailer does a pretty good job at showcasing everything you'll experience in the game: you choose the location of your depot on a real-world map pulled from OpenMap, build your depot buildings, buy some buses, and then run routes along real-world streets to, presumably, create the local bus transit network that you wish you had; with customisation that extends to the paint jobs of your buses and the layout & decoration of your depot.

Where the game falls flat, however, is that it is incredibly shallow; there's no real simulation going on for passengers aside from a randomly-generated source-and-destination from within your bus-stop radius, so your routes will work fine being completely nonsensical as long as they contain some points of interest; there's no waves of kids and students needing to get to specific schools, no office-workers needing to get to specific offices - just an amalgam of faceless numbers who pop in and out of existence as the map's locations vaguely demand.

Because of that, there's no need to create routes that serve particular communities or travel in both directions - you just need to cover an area in bus stops and you're good to go - the only depth in the route-planning gameplay is what you choose to imagine for the sake of roleplay.

That shallow depth unfortunately also extends to the depot customisation: at your disposal are a handful of plants, 3 of the same armchair in different shades of grey, and a dozen or so miscellaneous room-specific bits'n'bobs like a music player, foosball table, coffee maker or kitchen sink that your staff don't interact with. It hardly inspires creativity, and the depot instead just becomes a chore; placing the same 4 or 5 furniture items over and over until the depot's "decoration" meter meets the required amount.

The UI also contains a number of frustrations, both in the form of missing features (no way to monitor staff stress-levels over time, no way to check route utilisations for each timetable, no way to understand the relation between ticket inspectors and fines / skipped fares), and in the form of control faux-pas (ESC closing entire windows instead of going back a step, making modifying timetables frustrating, walls in the depot not being cut-away when facing the camera so you can't see what you're modifying etc).

The game also often feels like it's wasting your time, with sometimes nothing to do on a given day aside from watching the money slowly roll in, and no way of speeding-up time beyond 3-speed, which is nowhere near fast enough.

All-in-all, it feels undercooked; it set its sights too low to achieve gameplay that could have been more engaging, and the limited gameplay it does have is hamstrung by a lack of variety. If you're looking for a game about as deep as Game Dev Tycoon, but which will demand days of your time instead of hours, then this game will happily charge your 3x the price for the privilege.

Absolutely do not buy at full price, but there is some fun to be had here as long as both the price-point and your expectations are low.

It pains me to mark this as not recommended, not because the game is a stinker, but because it is vastly overpriced and requires too much micro-management (and without that micro-management, there wouldn't be much of a game left). The price it commands gives you the impression of a AA-rated game, but this isn't that, the graphics are just so so and also has a so so playing experience.

The problems I countered were quite numerous, maybe some might be fixed during the Early Access phase of the game, but some may not be resolvable without major code changes. One example, we select a depot location, but then nothing in the depot resembles where we've selected it, instead being a generic American city. Make a new game, and it's the exact same depot layout, therefore no effort has been made to correlate my actual selected location with what I visually see in the game. The graphics resemble any number of indie games I've played, so you're not catapulted into this the games immersion.

I painstakingly go through the tutorial, which gives scant information on how to do stuff, leaving the new player to just click everything until it works. There's a lot of assumption, and not enough explanation. As an example, you select between Village and City but you get no information on its significance (if you're wondering, it's the depot asthetics and your depot "street" entrance is moved slightly, allowing you room to build small parking spaces off the side in village mode)

You build the depot (as per the tutorial) and now "Your first bus route". But there's no information on catchment areas, or how demand is created. So you plot down a route of about 20 bus stops with little to no regard to what you're doing or why. The forecast says required buses: 5, but what it doesn't say is that you need that for both morning and afternoon, so you end up needing 10 buses and 10 drivers for a 5 bus service! So you buy the buses, but are forced to do so one at a time, having to select the colour each time... bit of copy pasting of the hexadecimal helps, but there are far better ways to do it.

You check the map... hundreds of people waiting at the bus stops. With so much demand, tickets prices are cranked to the max, £2.50 per short distance (again no explanation of what short distance means), single tickets to £4, Day to £10 and weekly to £37. Still the buses are at breaking point. Every bus is full to capacity. Can't add more buses onto the route, the maximum service frequency allowed is every 10 minutes. More bus routes needed, but I got to get this one bus route up and running first...

...then the micro-manaing kicks in. Every day, I have to assign every driver to every bus, and I can only do this within a couple hours of the timetabled departure. Every day I have to clean every bus, and send buses one at a time to be refuelled and externally washed, having to wait until one bus is finished before sending the next one for their fuel/cleaning.
Edit: After a while you get the research to have this daily micromanaging of staff to once a week with a single button to just randomly allocate the crew and bus choice, but you still have to do the cleaning and refuelling.

Edit: Bugs, there are a few, including game-breaking bugs such as failing to load a saved file or stuck vehicles aimlessy trying and failing to do the same action. Whilst it's good there's an easy bug report mechanism, it's limited to one bug every 5 minutes, and bug reports being responded with "unfortunately we cannot fix the error... the cost of fixing the bug would unfortunately exceed the benefit". Maybe some bugs are too costly to fix, but when one bug has the most simplest of solutions, to replace the space with \u00A0 then it does raise some eyebrows. There are also data anomolies with what I see, forcing some deep dive investigations. The numbers don't add up. The demand doesn't add up. There's a lot of lag, where you try to move across the screen and it jumps. There's inconsistency with the game speed, you pause the game, go into a menu, come out, and the game is at full blast. At full blast, you time jump, and it comes out at single speed. And why do my staff just aimlessly walk around, tell me they have no work to do, but have their stress bar at the max walking right past the 20 comfy armchairs I've provided them.

In a nut-shell, I don't recommend the game at the moment as it's got too expensive for what it is, there's too much micro-management, and not enough of what makes a game good. It's certainly appealing to build your buses around places you may know and love, but the map data it relies on, the OSM, has errors. Because it's a community site based upon volunteers, this is not unsurprising, and it's certainly not the end of the world, you could go about correcting the OSM as a volunteer, but the developers of the game have indicated this may cause problems with players saved games, and so changes to the OSM map won't filter through to the game. So you're stuck with broken roads, missing bus stops and a strange passenger demand system.

It's a good game, but not so good as expected.

For me, it's intriguing to complete the first 20-25 missions, but I lose interest when the mission requires selling 47k tickets. If you don't play under sandbox mode, the shift table is unlocked very late. This means you need to manually assign drivers to shifts EVERY SINGLE DAY in the game. My laptop has an RTX 3060 GPU and 16G memory, but the game starts to lag after about 15 bus lines are created and about 100 employees are recruited.

If you are not an avid sandbox game lover, you will lose your interest after 20 or 30 hours of gaming. The game can still improve because it's still being refined, but I don't think a lot of people will buy it if there is no new gameplay added.

Devs lock content in DLC, with the game not even finished! Poor decisions and I can't support this behaviour.

Started with dreams of running a world-class bus empire, ended up micromanaging angry drivers and dirty buses. Fun for a while, but the grind hits hard. Still, at least my depot has a nice kitchen. 🚌😂

Follow my curator page for more traffic jams, route mayhem, and passengers who expect too much! 🚏🚌
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42602807-Osiris-Reviews/

I was quite skeptical when I first found this game when I saw Aerosoft as a publisher, given my experience with their titles being "okay-ish, but not great". But I bought it and... didn't like it in the first early versions as it was more of a second work than a game. But now, the development is going nicely and the devs are actually listening to the player base. You can even report bugs and suggest features in-game. Selected features will then go through voting by the players and the most requested actually get implemented. It's really joyful to see an Early Access game with a healthy development and devs communicating with the community (looking at you, LOTUS!).

The gameplay is still lacking some features to reduce overwhelming amount of micromanagement when your company gets bigger, but I am not afraid to say that all this will be fleshed out soon. You can now create new buses from scratch and upload them to Workshop, which is amazing. And the amount of vehicles already released is astonishing.

While the game is now basically still going to be interesting for transport enthusiasts and the "common folk" will find the game too tedious, I will still go out and recommend this. I am kind of addicted to the game at this point.