Before I could drive, I spent countless hours travelling the country using National Express coaches in the UK. Now you may think it was a pleasurable experience, but it really wasn’t and took three times as long to get from one end of the country to the other than it would be driving your own car. Fernbus Simulator isn’t about sitting on a couch gazing out of the window, but it is about driving them across Europe. After almost seven years on Windows PC, the game has ventured onto the Xbox family of consoles and this will please enthusiasts who love titles such as Bus Simulator. Priced at £31.99/£39.99, has this game aged well and is it worth the entry fee involved?

Introduction

Now the synopsis of the game promises the experience of driving coaches across the highways and country roads in over 100 cities across 50,000km of recreated routes. To say the game is potentially massive is an understatement, the level of scope that you can drive across is humongous. You’ll be able to select from a variety of coaches and liveries with the ability to check in passengers and drop them off at their destination. This isn’t Grand Theft Auto though, so you must negotiate the roads in a sensible driving manner, adhere to the rules and regulations of the roads and avoid any accidents. Let’s just say my first accident came within the first hour of driving too fast around the autobahn in Germany!

Gameplay

The game is presented to you with literally no explanation or tutorial of what you’re supposed to do.  It’ll initially ask you to select Career mode or Freeplay. Career mode will allow you to create routes and transport passengers with detailed navigation within a limited radius. Freeplay will allow you to drive freely with no passengers, no navigation and the entire map unlocked. After selecting the Career option, there was no sense of direction of what I was actually meant to do but after several minutes of scratching my shiny bald head, I kind of figured things out. You start from a home base and can drive to a route local to you, you check in your passengers and drive from A to B.

Along your drive, you must drive as well as you can avoiding collisions, red lights and any bad driving habits. You also have to keep an eye on your fuel gauge to ensure you don’t run dry. Once you reach your destination you’ll get an analysis of how well you performed and it’ll highlight any areas where you didn’t do so well. As you level up during your career, more of the destinations on the map will unlock. Whilst some will like driving routes and unlocking more of the map, this is all that really progressed and it just felt very minimal. I was a little downhearted that there are no aspects of running the business outside of checking a few tickets. The choice of automatic or manual driving is there for those who want a deeper driving gameplay loop.

Graphics & Audio

I was actually gobsmacked by how good Fernbus Simulator looks and how detailed the presentation is on Xbox Series X. I haven’t explored the vast expanse of Europe IRL, but the landmarks are all displayed in a true-to-life fashion. Weather effects are really impressive and really change the dynamic of driving when raindrops are beating off the windscreen and the roads are laden with water. What really stood out was how the volume of traffic is consistently realistic throughout every drive I completed. I’ve played many simulator games where the world just seems barren and empty, but the development team has got everything spot on here.

The actual coach design and the interior is near perfect and though I have not studied the MAN Lion’s coach in detail, I’d imagine what I have seen is an exact replica. Unfortunately, there are some minor issues to point out aside from the good stuff. The passengers who board your coach don’t differ much in terms of character design, to the point where I had three of the same person lining up to the board. They could have been identical German triplets, but I am not so sure. I encountered some minor bugs such as occasional vehicles popping in late or disappearing completely. That said, I did like the details such as the spray emitting from the vehicles ahead of you when the road was wet, there are lots of nice little touches

The Radio Is Broken

There isn’t really much to judge in the audio area other than the general sound effects of driving. They all sounded as you’d expect them to be in the real world, heavy rainfall bouncing off the roof, windscreen wipers screeching, indicators clicking and so on. It is all spot on, but the lack of some potential music on the coach radio is very apparent. Just some unlicensed jingles on the radio for those lengthy drives, because they are long, would have been welcome. On the plus side, it is the perfect podcast-listening game if you want to zone out to your own audio.

In Conclusion

Fernbus Simulator is the ideal game if you just want to pick a route, hop in a coach, relax and drive. Beyond this, the game doesn’t really offer anything more with no real incentive to keep going with it. There is no business aspect to follow such as other similar games out there and I felt that even though the driving aspect is actually really enjoyable and realistic, the game served no purpose. This is a shame because visually the game is probably one of the most stunning I have seen in the entire genre and aside from some obvious bugs and glitches which can be fixed, it is near perfect in this regard.

As I said, if you’re the kind of person who likes to kick back and just drive without any real objective other than getting from A to B and want a stress-free experience without worrying about business aspects of a Bus Sim type experience, then this is for you. If you enjoy the management of fleets of buses, the financial and logistical juggling of running a transport business, then you may want to look elsewhere.